That's a Big Pile of...
The chaotic theory of convenience marketing in a post-global marketplace...
Last week, my wife and I both had a day from Hell. Neither of us felt like doing much of anything, #relatablecontent, and we decided to go out to dinner. What we found on our little jaunt surprised us both.
We decided to go to Chili’s and sit down. Having a different ambiance and someone bringing us food sounded better with our heads buzzing and spinning from the day’s happenings.
I was dead set on some soup and chicken, the weather seemed to demand it. Then I took a look at the back of the menu. I mentally turned down the volume of the sizzling fajitas walking by so I could read the menu better, and there staring me in the face was what I have come to recognize as the deal of the century; for only $10.99, I could have soup, an Arnold Palmer, a burger, and fries.
They don’t serve soup at Carl’s, but if they did, I could easily pay well over $20 for the same. Since when did the fast food joints get to charge more than a sit-down restaurant? Double?
Something had slipped by me over the first half of my life. A majority of Americans alongside myself had done something that sounded blatantly obvious… They demanded convenience so hard that sit-down restaurants took it in the shorts to win back business flying to drive-throughs for twice the money.
My mind wandered through the missed evidence I saw over the years. Amazon, Shein, Temu, etc all sauntered into my mental salon for a chat. I credited their success to us demanding more and more for the same money. Classic misattribution. I have begun to understand that the reason for the success seems to be an increase in social anxiety combined with the potent and heady musk of convenience. The 7-11-ization of things! I’ve been paying more for inferior doughnuts for years. Less for better coffee, notably, but more for most other things, even apples-to-apples.
How we buy things is more important nowadays than how much we buy, or even what we buy.
Shein and Temu were simple to suss out: we would easily tolerate crappier stuff if it was cheap and fast. My dear friend Mike would use a shopping app called Geek back in the early 10s to get his fix for cheap knick-knacks if he didn’t mind waiting exceptionally long. We sacrificed convenience back then for price and waited for our doodads. Since then, prices have fallen and they have seppuku-ed their dishonorably long wait times.
Amazon was harder, as it wasn’t cheaper, but it was faster and didn’t require us to wash our asses to buy cheese doodles. You also didn’t have to sacrifice quality to use them, either. Name brands sell there, and you can often find them for sale on Prime, guaranteeing that impulse buying wouldn’t delay that dopamine hit any longer than was necessary.
Years of price pressure have given way to cross-faded, naked 4 AM shop-a-paloozas fueled by strong desires to avoid people and weather and facilitated by the data gathered by that little black mirror we all have in our pockets. The elite would stow that mirror securely in a plastic clip or leather holster fastened to their belts, but that’s beyond the point.
The unbelievable power of global markets to give what is demanded has remained undeniable. The only holdout is what we are demanding. Much like rats in a study given the ability to electroshock themselves into little rat orgasms, we will hit that button until we die, damn the science.
Motorized Olive Garden rotary cheese grater: BZZZZT!
Vintage BluBlocker sunglasses? ZZAAAAAP!
a 3-day supply of beef sticks (ripoff… the box said 50)? BLAZRRRRK!
Aaaaaaand I’m spent…
So how does this tie into the world today? Lambasting globalism has been a hobby horse of many a politically minded individual over the past decade or so. With the recent shift in political power in the US, the mood of the top surrounding international free markets has suffered a vibe shift; They caught the car, so to speak.
Now what? As tariffs are mostly bargaining tools, we may not see massive change in products imported from our trading allies. Some others, namely China, haven’t been lucky enough to consider themselves that for a long time.
More than just tariffs can affect this. Recent US Customs policy changes have impacted Temu and Shein. They both relied on the small size of parcels and other loopholes to avoid customs inspections and fees. With that ending, some say to expect greater than 10% cost increases for the business vertical.
That is shared by all parts of the production chain, including the consumer.
The pricing pressures applied to these convenience-driven markets will prove exceptionally hard to mitigate, as they will also seriously impact the timeliness of deliveries in these channels.
This will not just impact companies based in China. It will affect anyone who imports things from there.
People tend to conclude without considering all options. This might drive someone to say “This will make income inequality worse” or “we will all be poor”, without considering human and systemic responses.
Recall the Peak Oil Theory, The Population Bomb, and the Y2K bug. We found solutions or discovered shortcomings with these theories as we went along. Y2K was abated by the hard work of software engineers and embedded IT professionals. Extraction and surveying technology changed all the metrics on Peak Oil. The population bomb was defused by agricultural advancements and the Green Revolution.
We didn’t predict these solutions, but dedication, hard work, and emergent order addressed them. It stands to reason that the same mechanics would apply here. Billions of humans will work hard to make their lives work in a less globalized world. That does mean some sacrifices, but in the words of Dr. Ian Malcom, PhD, “Life…uh…finds a way”.
Or was it “That’s a big pile of shit”.
