Pre-Boomer Musings

We pre-boomers remember when there was a gas station on every major corner, several different brands for every type of product in the supermarket and dozens of airlines from which to choose.  What happened?

You can think of other areas were there are fewer choices, but let’s stick with these for now.  At first, the big oil companies bought up smaller retailers, keeping the better locations, changing the signage to their name, and letting the less desirable properties go. The next step was for some of the larger companies to merge and create big national brands while reducing competition.  With this came higher prices, which the companies say is a result of increased crude oil prices, the refining requirements in different states, and the overall cost of producing cleaner burning fuel.  More recently, some of the giants have decided to forsake the retail business all-together and concentrate on exploration, refining, and wholesaling thereby eliminating marketing costs.

Mergers also have affected the choice of the groceries we buy.  Supermarkets were once a local business, with a few quasi-national chains.  The big chains bought the smaller chains, discarding the unwanted stores and moving into new territory after new territory.  As the stores became more powerful, they placed greater demands on manufacturers.  The big marketers, strong in their own right, saw this as an opportunity to shove the smaller, often local or regional, brands off the shelf.

They bought the more promising companies and expanded their shelf space while others struggled to survive.  Look at the cookie section, for example, one company’s brands dominate the shelves with a couple of other large marketers having just a few items.  Gone are many of the varieties these competitors once offered, and the local or specialty cookies are no longer available.  The space is now occupied by store brands in varieties that compete directly with the major national brands on the shelf.  Another change you may have noticed is the prices are now higher than ever.

The airline industry followed the same pattern as the others mentioned above.  The national companies or strong regional ones bought the smaller airlines and started flying their routes with planes marked with their brand names.  But fuel and other operating costs were a burden to the companies who have added fees for baggage and such while reducing in-flight services like food service.  So the airlines are either merging or going in and coming out of chapter 11.  There’s little enjoyment and no incentive to fly these days.

Are we going to sit back and let the big companies get bigger and bigger and ask us to pay more and more while providing fewer and fewer choices?  Or are we going to pick up the phone or go online and let the customer service departments of the offending corporations know how we feel.  There’s no need to make this a cause celebre, but enough people telling them “this is enough” may be enough to get the big wigs at these firms to reconsider their current strategies.  The choice is yours.

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