Business thought experiment?

[Anonymous No.56157097]

Lets say you run a business. Like grilling cheeseburgers. You are doing it manually then hire some employees. You eventually realize that by introducing any sort of automation there becomes an increase of output value by improving the yield achievable per your burger wagies. Now interestingly, you realize that if you keep automating more and more inefficiencies in their jobs you get a compounding increase on the total net value per time. The automation begins compounding its own effects. Now keep automating further and further. Maybe you introduce drive-through lanes, you pay an online service to start delivering your burgers directly to customers, you introduce self-service kiosks etc. However to your surprise, we get to a point where the total output of cheeseburgers exceeds the total amount of customer demand. It doesn't matter how many burgers we make because literally no one wants to eat another bite. It seems the lack of demand became a hard cutoff. Your profits stagnate

So now what. You think to somehow reduce your own costs even further. You start evaluating your own expenditures. Not only are you a business - but also a consuming entity. Just one business in a long chain of businesses that make up the economy. So you shop around and find beef suppliers that have optimized their own processes. You find one supplier that integrated a new ai cow farming automation system that lets their farmer wagies work 10x more efficiently and pass their savings on to you. And the company that made their beef automation software was able to leverage offshore employees and automated headhunting to reduce their own costs which means the software is relatively cheap. In fact the more you research it, every business in this chain further and further optimized every possible inefficiency. But you still have a dilemma, because you're now able to make burgers for very cheap, yet no one wants any more burgers, they are still full.

[Anonymous No.56157100]

>>56157097

Shit, what do we do now? Marketing won't work well because people don't want more burgers. We can't sell the cheeseburger for any other uses because it serves no other purpose. Well maybe we can get customers to buy more than they want? How? Well you hire some food scientists who are able to make the burgers taste so fucking good that people literally disregard their own health to keep eating them. It works so well that you cannot keep up with this new demand. You scale up everything and keep pumping out cheeseburgers.

Business is going great. You have a location on every corner in every city. You become a national brand. But there's been a problem. Demand has plateaued, for some reason you can't seem to sell any more burgers. After some research you come to the startling conclusion that everyone is so fucking fat that they're dying of heart disease and diabetes early, which is lowering their total lifespan burger purchases. And the amount of new children cannot keep up with the accelerated loss of their parents. Heart disease becomes the number 1 cause of death among customers. No matter how much you further automate every facet of the business, it seems that demand - and therefore income will not increase further. Hmmmm. Maybe you could make the burgers healthier? Yet then we would likely reach the same profit plateau from before. And regardless the costumers would just simply choose your competitors over your healthy burgers.

[Anonymous No.56157105]

>>56157100
Maybe there is another way increase the amount of customers even further? What if we can somehow increase immigration? What if we can accelerate the population growth to offset the rise of mortality, and thus increase demand of your cheeseburgers? So you start lobbying and funding politicians that believe in your same noble ideals. Immigrants start moving here for a chance at a better life. Amazingly this works. It works really well. Demand and profits increase further. They tell their family back home about their favorite cheeseburgers too. You start scaling globally. Despite declining lifespans and fertility issues among your customers, the demand keeps increasing. This continues for years, but slowly an alarming trend starts to emerge. Despite massive immigration and globalization, demand is once again stagnating. It seems the increase in population led to an increase in the cost of living for your main customer base. Facing economic uncertainty many of the customers stopped having children entirely and birthrates are starting to rapidly decline. At the same time their paychecks are being squeezed thin, and they can't afford to buy as many cheeseburgers as before. Your own employees start demanding more compensation. Not only that but your other costs begin creeping up. Your real estate costs begin skyrocketing.

So wtf now? You tell your scientists to start researching ways to imitate the cheeseburgers at a lower cost. Crickets? Grasshoppers? Onions? hmm. No matter what you try, the products just taste like shit. And the customers are even starting to grow resentful. You and other companies start a global propaganda campaign to push fertility among the biggest spending demographics. But customers will not eat the fake burgers and demand to eat real meat. They start complaining about your shallow marketing attempts. They demand the slop they have been eating for years now and your employees demand higher wages

now what? How do you increase profits?

[Anonymous No.56157142]

[Anonymous No.56157170]

You would start selling your customers. You would sell your products at a loss knowing the payment would be made up by selling your customers as a product as well. Welcome to the information economy OP, the products are chosen for you because you’re a product.

[Anonymous No.56157203]

Simple, you stop. After a certain point why not be satisfied take your winnings and sell to some idiot who thinks they can grow it.

[Anonymous No.56157219]

>>56157105
>How do you increase profits?
Reverse course entirely; start pursuing a nativist agenda politically that results in the mass deportation of unwanted illegals. Pursue a committed global strategy of delivering the best burger with the highest quality ingredients. Essentially, trade profit for a good product while reversing the influence of the company's previous course. This alone would convince me to be a "three-for-free" man.

[Anonymous No.56157232]

>>56157219
This of course requires understanding of the Burger Paradigm

>trade profit for good product quality = increase in sales at expense of bottom line
>trade product quality for profit = more sales at the cost of dissatisfied customers

[Anonymous No.56157321]

>>56157097
>>56157100
>>56157105
good read, a bit out of order but highlights modern capitalism.

>how do you increase profits?
at this point you start collection every single shred of data from the billions of customers that buy your slop. you invest in biometric & facial recognition in hopes of selling this harvested data at a high price to technology companies who have more money than other industries and need raw human data to develop prediction models with behavior algorithms. the technology companies then sell these predictive models to other companies so they can further drive efficiencies in their business & squeeze more profits from customers.

[Anonymous No.56157332]

>>56157097
Advertise so people overeat and become disgusting pigs
> you have invented America

[Anonymous No.56157343]

>>56157321
good idea but where does it end and how do i invest in that as a consumer

[Anonymous No.56157361]

>>56157343
>where does it end?
its not supposed to end its supposed to be a forever ponzi of ever increasing population & money supply. the real answer is, its all ends when the music stops playing
>how do i invest?
buy companies using ai & data analytics as a service or buy the established companies that continue to increase sales & profits (until they dont)

[Anonymous No.56157365]

>>56157343
It ends in everyone eating burgers continuously causing them to shit continuously, which is automatically recycled into new burgers.
After this loop you simply increase the speed of the shit/burger escalator by 4% per year to further increase profits.

[Anonymous No.56158495]

At this point non burger foods need to be made illegal.
That or take more experimental sandwiches and make a different company. Don't want to fuckup the brand that works, even though growth is limited for it.