Haymaker, I'll let your blathering posts speak for themselves.
Mike in reference to Coke and Pepsi: "Have you looked at their price increases lately?"
Mike in reference to shipping calves: "Cost me $35 a head to send calves to the feedyard last year. No telling what it is now that fuel has almost doubled."
Amazing how you can understand rising fuel costs as it relates to your increased costs to ship calves but you cannot make the connection to these same rising fuel costs CONTRIBUTING TO the rising costs of coke and pepsi??
Mike: "Pepsi and Coke prove only that government intervention and squashing the competition is dictated in the corporate boardroom. Competition has been stepped on like a roach."
Pepsi and Coke like Anheiser Busch, Miller Brewing, and Coors like Ford, Chrysler, and GM and hudreds of other examples of INDUSTRY CONCENTRATION only proves that the most efficient companies survive WITH TRUE COMPETITION FREE FROM GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION.
I'd rather see the free enterprise system determine competition rather than your "PLEASE GOVERNMENT, SQUASH THE BIG SUCCESSFUL CORPORATION SO US LESS EFFICIENT COMPANIES CAN COMPETE" government intervention alternative.
This anti corporate mentality reminds me of the "dumbing down" process in our school systems so the underachievers can compete with the overachievers.
"Punish achievement" / "regulate prosperity", some things never change!
Mike: "You'd be surprised at the manipulations and hostile takovers in the soft drink industry."
Why hasn't Pepsi taken over Coke or why hasn't Coke taken over Pepsi?
It's never that the less efficient companies couldn't compete is it?
It's always "HOSTILE TAKEOVERS" and "SQUASHING THE COMPETITION" with the "anti corporates" isn't it????
Mike: "There are books on how crooked this business is/was."
Yeh and of course they all tell the truth don't they?
Probably written by the less efficient, less successful company that couldn't compete.
There is also a book written about packer concentration and how that affects market competition by Benjamin Roberts. I asked Benjamin Roberts how Armour, Wilson, Swift, Cudahey, and Morris became ibp, Excel, Monfort, National, and Smithfield IN AN INDUSTRY THAT IS SUPPOSEDLY CONTROLLED????
He couldn't answer that simple question!
If the packing industry, like the soft drink industry, is "supposedly" controlled by "HOSTILE TAKEOVERS" or "SQUASHING THE COMPETITION" like the packer blamers would lead us to believe, what happened to all the original companies?
Once again the obvious is simply too obvious isn't it?
Sandhusker: "What a wonderful example of "competition". 30 years ago, when I was 10, I remember buying 12oz bottles of coke for a dime. Now that same volume (in a cheaper container) costs 75 cents. Would you like to compare that increase in price to inflation during the same period, SH?"
The fact that you would use the price increase of pop in 30 years to make your point about a "supposed" lack of competition proves how naive you really are about the costs involved with large companies.
So why don't you invest in a soft drink company and put your money where your mouth is?
If you guys are so convinced that the rising cost of coke and pepsi is proof of a lack of competition, HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THE PRICE OF BOTTLED WATER????
Heck, that's just water. How tough can it be to bottle water and sell it for $1.00 per bottle? MUST BE QUITE A RACKET HUH???
With prices that high there must still be a profit to be made by undercutting $1.00 bottled water isn't there?
Give it a try and let me know how you turn out then maybe you'll figure out why coke and pepsi products are priced where they are.
BLAMERS.......sheeeesh!
Mike: "If we go by your assimilations of competition, there will be only a few large corporations running the entire agribusiness show here."
There already is.
How many tractor companies are there??????
HOSTILE TAKEOVERS and SQUASHING THE COMPETITION or the result of increased efficiencies?
You can't fathom the concept of mergers being "mutually beneficial" can you?
Mike: "Scott Kilman in the Wall Street Journal reports that ADM's total legal tab "for one of the biggest global price-fixing scandals of the 1990s" has now climbed to more than $250 million, including criminal fines, civil settlements and lawyer bills and that tab "will probably rise as more governments pile on" as "antitrust regulators in Mexico and Brazil are mulling whether to levy their own penalties."
Innocent until proven guilty. I look at mounting legal fees as evidence of the increased efforts of anti corporate blamers looking to the legal system to regulate prosperity.
Radar: "Ever here of automation? Not trying to be sarcastic, but when I am truly amazed at the amount of work being done with scarcely a handful of people in some of these facilities. I would be very interested to know the ratio of people to bottle of Coke put out today vs. that of 30 years ago."
Perhaps that might explain some of the down trend in manufacturing jobs that the dems claim are all moving over seas huh?
~SH~