[HN Gopher] The cutest monopoly: Koala Kare
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The cutest monopoly: Koala Kare
Author : Anon84
Score : 38 points
Date : 2024-06-30 11:17 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (thehustle.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehustle.co)
| talldayo wrote:
| > In the age of antitrust, why has Koala Kare, Big Baby Change
| Station, flown under the radar?
|
| Proportionality, it seems. Why has nobody sued the printer ink
| monopolists? Because compared to Google or Apple they're somewhat
| of a lesser evil.
| 1propionyl wrote:
| Same with Crayola. The reality is that Koala Kare and Crayola
| simply do not affect people's lives as much as tech giants on
| the list (Amazon and Apple), or CPGs like Hershey's candy bars
| or Gatorade beverages.
|
| To put a finer colored wax point on it: my crayon doesn't have
| access to my entire online life or my shopping habits, and I
| have no effective societal obligation to own Crayola crayons.
| drbig wrote:
| > and I have no effective societal obligation to own Crayola
| crayons.
|
| Thanks for that insight. "Vote with your wallet" and similar
| responses seem to die under the actual, practical, reality of
| exclusion and/or lack of access.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Because it's not the age of antitrust, and nothing has been
| broken up? Lina Khan trying her best does not an age of
| antitrust make.
|
| It's an age of unprecedented concentration of ownership with
| attendant open and unashamed market manipulation, which of
| course makes people talk about antitrust more, while also
| having absolutely no mechanism to do anything about it, which
| makes them talk about it with a tone of frustration and anger.
|
| But frustration and anger does not break up companies.
| Functioning governments do.
| bsder wrote:
| This is a monopoly without lock-in or network effect. As such, it
| really isn't a priority.
|
| If KoalaCare raises prices or collapses quality, they'll get a
| competitor. A maintenance department can replace every single
| changing station in a big office building in a month if they
| wanted to.
| mylastattempt wrote:
| It seems the author does not see the difference between a
| monopoly on a service as opposed to a monopoly on a product.
| These changing stations can be replaced without any difficulty,
| by another brand, if the need arises. For services or whole
| ecosystems, such as Google and Apple (iCloud, Apple Pay, etc)
| there is a huge vendor lock-in, even for consumers. Monopolies in
| the latter are unwanted most of the time. But being the major
| manufacturer and distributor of some non-consumer-bought public
| bathroom equipment doesn't really do much harm, since a
| competitor can arise relatively easily if need be.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > It seems the author does not see the difference between a
| monopoly on a service as opposed to a monopoly on a product.
|
| It seems that they don't even know what a monopoly is _at all_
| in the context of their own article about antitrust laws,
| really.
| xnyan wrote:
| >these changing stations can be replaced without any difficulty
|
| Don't disagree that a plastic changing station can be
| efficiently made by someone else, but I think you may be
| misunderstanding their advantage. Koala is providing a service
| in the world of "places in which the public use the bathroom",
| which is part of the "places occupied by the public" market.
| There are an unfathomable amount of needs, requirements,
| practical concerns, laws/regulations, etc that have to be
| served when you operate a public space.
|
| Koala is part of the established suite of solutions to the
| problem of operating a public space, and "supply chain
| diversity" or even "we cost marginally less" is not enough to
| displace them. Koala would have to really mess up or you'd have
| to offer a significant advantage to displace a solved problem
| at an affordable price when it's just one of a thousand things
| you need to think about.
|
| tldr: rent seeking is reliable way to make money if you don't
| mess up your core value or get too greedy for the market to
| bear
| autoexec wrote:
| It's better for everyone when there is healthy competition in a
| market and companies are forced to attract buyers on things
| like innovations, features, service, and price, but honestly I
| don't mind too much when one company basically dominates the
| market as long as they aren't going out of their way to
| shutdown competition. Pressuring companies to sign exclusive
| deals, bribing government for exclusive contracts, buying up
| competitors or operating at a loss to squeeze them out, etc.
| Those are signs that antitrust regulators might need to pay
| attention. Same when there is competition but it looks like is
| collusion on prices, innovation stagnates, and customers are
| unhappy.
| toast0 wrote:
| > "If you have a monopoly just because you're the only one who
| happens to make something and no one else wants to make it,
| there's nothing wrong with that," Milici says.
|
| > "US antitrust law doesn't prohibit monopolies. It prohibits
| conduct by monopolists."
|
| > Meanwhile, companies like Crayola (83%) or Gatorade (63%) have
| faced little scrutiny.
|
| AFAIK, none of these companies are known to engage in prohibited
| conduct, so that's probably why they've not had much scrutiny.
|
| You don't hear about Koala Kare forcing you into buying anything
| else if you want their change stations, or anything like that.
| There's free competition, but the Koala stations seem to work
| well and so there you go. If RubberMade is one of the major
| alternates and they can't sell a lot of them, I dunno ...
| RubberMade products are very common in commercial buildings.
|
| Same thing with Crayola, maybe they've got some super secret
| thing where they buy up all the crayon making supplies, or maybe
| everyone else just makes shitty crayons and you only have to get
| burned a couple times before you're like Crayola crayons are
| always reasonable, just gonna buy those. Maybe not their markers
| though, I'm partial to Sanford's Mr. Sketch Scented Markers.
| righthand wrote:
| I mean Gatorade you can make at home with 3 ingredients so
| definitely not a monopoly.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Or you can buy a bottle of Gatorade and mix salt and vinegar
| and lemon juice into it and then have your son give that to
| the bully that's been stealing his Gatorade.
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/mother-arrested-after-
| concocti...
| morkalork wrote:
| That's pretty much the point right? It's not like buying a
| Koala Kare change station contractually locks you out of buying
| something else from one of their competitors, unlike I don't
| know, what happened between Dell, Intel and AMD...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Indeed. One can put a Koala Care change station _right next
| to_ a Diaper Depot change station, and this is fine.
|
| They might have different features, functions, and/or prices,
| and that's OK too.
|
| It can even be OK for people like architects to freely (but
| consistently) specify one particular brand in deference to
| other brands. This is fine, too.
|
| An architect stating something "We always specify Hubbell
| wiring devices, Sherwin Williams paint, and Koala Care
| changing stations wherever applicable because they've so-far
| proven to offer a consistently excellent combination of
| performance, service, and value" is not, on its face, an
| improper thing to do.
|
| It can be quite OK and perfectly-legal to have a natural
| monopoly. Selling a _very, very popular_ widget is not an act
| that is somehow automatically worthy of damnation.
|
| However, it can be very not OK (and often very illegal) for a
| company to _abuse_ their status as a natural monopoly,
| especially in anticompetitive ways.
|
| But I don't see anyone accusing Koala Care of any specific
| wrongdoing, so.....
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's pretty obvious why Rubbermade is losing out: it looks
| sterile while the Koala Kare one has a cute little koala
| graphic on it. I bet it wins out in the market entirely thanks
| to that graphic.
| bradfitz wrote:
| I'm suddenly reminded of an old tweet of mine:
| https://x.com/bradfitz/status/825404204055359488
|
| "A moment of silence please for all the babies who fell off not-
| so-Sturdy Station v1. #ScaryVersionNumbers"
| jader201 wrote:
| Re: Gatorade's 63% monopoly, I've recently thought about how
| quickly Prime went to mass market. It seems like it blew up on
| YouTube and stores couldn't keep it in stock.
|
| Then all of the sudden, it's sitting next to Gatorade in huge
| volumes at Costco.
|
| I've never seen a product so quickly "disrupt" a long-time
| monopoly. It remains to be seen whether it's a fad or if they
| could actually compete with Gatorade, but it seems like they
| could, if anyone could.
|
| To be clear, I'm personally not a fan of how companies like this
| use marketing (especially on YouTube) targeting young --
| impressionable -- audiences, so I'm not necessarily rooting for
| either one of them (Gatorade is horribly unhealthy). But I have
| found it interesting at the very least.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| Where do you live? I'm in the northeast and I've never heard of
| Prime before, and I can't remember ever seeing it (maybe in one
| or two stores), although maybe my eyes just skip over it since
| I'm usually looking for Gatorade.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I, too, live above the Mason-Dixon line and I've never heard
| of Prime either.
|
| But maybe this has less to do with geography, and more to do
| with the media that we allow ourselves to be exposed to.
|
| For instance: I haven't watched regular advertising-supported
| TV (OTA or streaming or otherwise) for at least a decade, and
| my general online experience (including with things like
| YouTube) is generally completely ad-free (thanks,
| Sponsorblock and uBlock Origin).
|
| I am, very purposefully and intentionally, rather "out of the
| loop" when it comes to advertising for trendy things.
| roland35 wrote:
| The beverage industry spends a huge amount on advertising, and
| Prime is probably a good example of why!
| xorcist wrote:
| Not really a monopoly, as there are several competing brands. At
| least abroad. There are plenty of other markets with an
| dominating actor where competition isn't harmed, so it's not
| considered problematic in the antitrust sense.
|
| One should probably take the invention story here as just a
| story, foldable diaper changing stations were starting to get
| common in 1986, at least in the Nordics.
| tetris11 wrote:
| > The Koala joined the ranks of omnipresent brands that have
| surpassed the generic names for what they make: think Kleenex,
| Chapstick, Play-Doh, and so on.
|
| I was surprised when someone said to me "do you want a tempo?"
| after I sneezed. I had to ask them to clarify before I got it
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| I don't get it
| zer00eyz wrote:
| Tempo? or Tissue? I'm very confused now.
|
| Am I missing it too or do you sneeze in funk?
| fragmede wrote:
| Tempo is a popular tissue brand is other parts of the world,
| aka asking someone if they want a Kleenex vs a tissue.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| Yes, give me the tempo. I'm the Coltrane of jazz sneezing
| solos.
| pchristensen wrote:
| Only tangentially related, when my kids were younger, I used
| "changing table in the men's bathroom" as a useful measure of
| company health. It a) costs little, and b) required little care
| to make the decision, but a company or building that couldn't
| manage those two things was either broke or stagnant.
| toyg wrote:
| For the sake of this publication, I hope that they got paid by
| Google (in money or favours) for this rambling low-quality
| "article".
|
| A dominant position _in an open market with zero lock-in_ , is
| completely inconsequential to antitrust laws. Unless nefarious
| behaviour is alleged, it just means the product (and/or the
| branding) is superior.
|
| Can anyone replace a Koala product with an alternative, without
| suffering any repercussion? Yes. Can anyone build a bathroom
| without buying from Koala? Also yes. Will your bathroom continue
| to work if you remove a Koala product? Still yes. Are consumers
| or businesses suffering from this market dominance? Not really (I
| guess Koala can command slightly premium prices, but we're
| talking plastic building supplies here - the margins will likely
| be pretty low already).
|
| This has nothing to do with big-tech cases.
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