{"id":10541,"date":"2013-07-21T11:42:57","date_gmt":"2013-07-21T16:42:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=10541"},"modified":"2013-07-21T11:42:57","modified_gmt":"2013-07-21T16:42:57","slug":"the-locust-economy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=10541","title":{"rendered":"The Locust Economy"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Once locusts acquire an informed kind of market mobility through better discovery mechanisms, they can range over a much larger area of wheat fields or restaurants. You can continuously derive savings at the expense of other economic actors wheat farmers or restaurant owners.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ribbonfarm.com\/2013\/04\/03\/the-locust-economy\/\">The Locust Economy<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>To take coffee shops as an example, an unending supply of idealistic wannabe cafe owners enters the sector every year, operates at a loss for a few years, and exits.\u00a0The result is that even under\u00a0<em>normal\u00a0<\/em>business conditions, without swarming locust consumers, this is a loss-making business with an extinction rate of around 90% at the 5 year point in the US. Starbucks has the scale to be profitable and resilient. Locust coffee drinkers happily drink the excellent, loss-making coffee from small, local Jeffersonian coffee shops and callously retreat to Starbucks or DIY homebrew if the prices go up.<\/p>\n<p>Starbucks survives, coffee drinking grasshoppers survive, small coffee shops go in and out of business.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Once locusts acquire an informed kind of market mobility through better discovery mechanisms, they can range over a much larger area of wheat fields or restaurants. You can continuously derive savings at the expense of other economic actors wheat farmers &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/?p=10541\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[378],"tags":[589,63,103],"class_list":["post-10541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing","tag-economics","tag-groupon","tag-market-analysis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bucktownbell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}