There's a family-run bakery near my house that specializes in cheesecakes. They make the best cheesecakes I've ever tasted. They only make a certain number (~200, say, I dunno really) per day, they always sell out, then they close for the day. Every year they take a two-month vacation. That's it. That's the whole business.

Anthony Mangieri was downtown for a few years here in SF before he went back East. https://www.unapizza.com/about I got to eat there one time. Sublime. Unbelievable. All he does all day every day is pizza.

Something like that (and a good accountant) and you're set for life, eh?

That’s the truth - and it’s a good life, too. Easy to sleep at night, at least.

Ed: man, I had that pizza too - it was hyped to the roof and I didn’t want to admit it, but damned if that wasn’t the best pizza in the city...

> sell out, then they close for the day. Every year they take a two-month vacation.

What is stopping their landlord from raising the rent, since they obviously have money to spare?

Principles? Morals? Ethics?

The small things preventing humanity from murdering, raping, enslaving, and torturing one another. It's easy to forget that these exist and that everyone must always be on guard, defending the world against ones own baser instincts and defending oneself against humanity at larges baser instincts. As we collectively forget, or consciously ignore, our duty to one another we mortgage humanities future with collective suffering today. Eventually the bill on these ills come due, one way or another the sociological debt is always repaid.

Indeed. That's why I'm worried when I see interpersonal relations being replaced by market rules. Markets have no morals, principles and ethics by default, and generally consider these factors to be inefficiencies.

>Markets have no morals, principles and ethics by default

That's not exactly true. "Markets" are made of people, and the morals principles and ethics of each participant imbue any given market with certain characteristics. The market doesn't reflect the exact morals of one particular actor, but it is nevertheless a product of them. Think matrix multiplication.

For examples look at Roman civilization, Jewish civilization, the meeting of the two. Or look at the Wire.

I agree that "morals principles and ethics of each participant imbue any given market with certain characteristics". I was highlighting that these are incidental, not structural in the market. And my main point is: these characteristics are not stable. More than that, these characteristics are actively being diminished, ground down by the market - and that is a structural aspect.

This happens through competitive pressure. If, as a market player, do something slightly shady to get an edge, I'll get ahead and my competitors will either have to do the same, or risk losing. When enough market players go along, the slightly shady things becomes a baseline, "standard business practice", and morality on the market is that much eroded. Then someone else starts getting ahead on being even more shady, and the process repeats.

(Ironically, we often call this chipping away at ethics/morality "innovation".)

> The small things preventing humanity from murdering, raping, enslaving, and torturing one another

nothing, except for the threat of punishment from the law - which mostly works.

Why do you think in a country where the law enforcement failed (such as a failed state) breaks down in to chaos so easily? Where's the "Principles, Morals, Ethics" then?

> nothing, except for the threat of punishment from the law

You’ll be happy to know (I hope) that plenty of us (perhaps even the majority!) don’t have any intention to murder and rape, and it’s neither law nor religion which compels us to be minimally decent towards others: https://youtube.com/watch?v=AwebTX3rk3E

As far as I know, landlords are not known for possessing any of the qualities you list. Indeed, what is special and unusual about this situation might not be the bakery itself, but the landlord of that particular bakery. There might be thousands of such potential bakeries all over, but for the fact that the profits are extracted by the landlords, and this might be the normal state of things. We would have no way to tell.

> As far as I know, landlords are not known for possessing any of the qualities you list.

Landlords are people and subject to the same qualities and defects as other humans.

Perhaps they are “not know” for the positive because people make a kerfuffle when things go badly, not when they go well.

Here’s a positive story of a landlord having a major positive impact on hundreds of tenants: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/nyregion/coronavirus-nyc-...

Real estate prices depend on the market rate, not the buyer's wealth.

Market rate depends on what the buyers will bear, on aggregate. Given that rents are sticky - it costs a lot to move yourself, and even more to move a business - the landlord could eat into a lot of their margins, if the landlord was so inclined.

And it also costs a landlord when a business moves. How likely would they be to find new tenants if the previous tenants mention that they were forced out by an above-market rent increase? You're tilting at windmills.

I'm not tilting at windmills, it's a common business question: how much can we exploit the other party without driving them away?

Competition from other landlords

I like analogies, but I really don't think this one illuminates anything.

The US bread industry has been slowly jacking up the amount of sugar in their products for decades. That's because almost all large-scale food producers also want their product to be as addictive as crack. Maybe there are "bakers" who are more honest than that, but as a category I don't think there are enough to base a useful analogy on.

You could just work with the analogy, if you wanted.

"Food science" is all about engineering food to be addictive. Which, sure, it's what 'consumers want', but it isn't what people need.

The line between sprinkling MSG on corn chips fried in cheap seed oils, and sprinkling crack on cookies, is a fine one.

When I hear "baker" I picture a millennia-old activity carried out on a human scale. I don't picture an enormous factory churning out least-common-denominator starches, jacked up with sugar, seed oils, and dough conditioners.

Sure, they don't bake most of the bread. But that is clearly what OP was referring to, and you don't have to refuse to get their point.

Baker <--> Crack-dealer is a spectrum. But wherever you are on the spectrum, you always draw the line one step to the right.

It's not, though - that's the point. You're either a baker or you're a crack dealer - you don't get to be a baker that just sells a little crack, that's not how it works.

Isn't sugar a suitable substitute for crack?

Ever try scamming a crack addict with sugar?

No, but I bet you could manipulate a child using sugar. Probably lots of adults too.

I think that shall have potential to become a proverb.

I work for a very reputable company who produces high-quality content serving vital public interest. We still use "user engagement" as a metric in a mostly positive way. But we also aim to have content "go viral" and breed daily habits and we promote our content heavily on social media. We still have to pay the bills.

Two business models in tech: selling a product vs. selling ads. The latter is really selling your users.

selling a product vs selling ads vs selling a feeling (dopamine hits)?

Some freemium games are clearly just trying to hit the dopamine center.

right, baker and crack dealer.

Can you give few examples "baker" products which have scaled to really large scale? I always see it as everybody starts as a baker but over time it becomes a sliding scale.

Apple hardware/software, Microsoft Windows, Intel hardware, Netflix (buffet TV shows), Amazon web store (logistics), Etsy store, Steam / GOG Games - all of these (except Netflix) are selling* either hardware or software, to you, once.

Netflix is a subscription to access and stream a lot of shows, but it is "fee for subscription service", not all that different from an alarm company subscription, OnStar, or a subscription lawn maintenance company.

* Ok, Steam / GOG Games or Microsoft Windows is a licensed use with limited conditions, it's not like you can use it on just any hardware

I would not put Netflix in this category as there has been extensive coverage on how they try to get as much time spent as possible. Autoplaying content at the end of one show is a prime example, and how that time was optimized down to be incredibly short.

Short version: Subscription retention and time spent correlate, so they still have the "crack dealer" model incentives.

Most large e-commerce sites including Etsy aren't bakers. They use recommendation engines, personalized site experiences, email marketing campaigns, discount coupons for repeat purchases, dark patterns, offsite re-targeting ads and so on to get you to buy and buy repeatedly.

edit: And the ever fun one of free shipping with a minimum order of X, great way to make you think you're getting a deal by giving them more money.

I'd consider the auto industry to be a "baker" industry (for the most part). Ikea's a "baker", GAP is a "baker". A lot of the pre-digital world made pure play baked goods.

>A lot of the pre-digital world made pure play baked goods.

Coupon codes on your receipt, planned obsolescence, strategic item placement in store to encourage buying additional or more expensive items, loyalty programs and points, physical marketing mailings, targeted pre-internet advertising, etc.

Careful with fashion. Fashion trends are manipulated to keep the dopamine flowing if and only if you update your wardrobe every season. All the magazines, shows, etc... it's not entirely innocent of the problems we're discussing.

To piggy back on this, is it possible to continue being a baker at scale without pricing most people out of your product?

i.e. is it possible to provide something like (internet search) or (social networking) that relies on a paid model? Not everyone who needs/uses google or facebook can afford an iPhone.