Wuhan's Crayfish Market Now Offers Processing Services
Categories:
Wuhan’s crayfish market now offers processing services. After purchasing crayfish, free cleaning and processing services are provided next to the stall, with three people working together.
The first batch of vendors offering crayfish processing services can immediately gain some benefits and attract buyers. After all, this is a typical high-quality service of “having what others don’t”.
However, the barrier to entry for this service is low; any vendor can provide it by calling three people, but the cost is high, as the crayfish processing service occupies three laborers. If they cannot capture enough market share, this service will eventually cost more than it earns.
As long as vendors continue to sell crayfish throughout the summer, they will eventually find that the cost of this service far outweighs the benefits, but they cannot stop because it has become their selling point. Their customers have become accustomed to this service, and once it’s stopped, customers will be lost. You can choose not to offer this service from the beginning, but it’s difficult to withdraw after providing it for free.
Some people in business emphasize “giving a little more”. This strategy is naturally more welcomed by consumers than “giving a little less,” but it invisibly increases the merchants’ costs, trapping them in low-value, low-barrier competition, where eventually no one makes money and the industry withers. Therefore, the question of whether some industries decline due to poor service or due to good service is worth deep consideration.
Many large corporations also engage in similar loss-making activities to gain attention, with the purpose of achieving monopoly, until one day there is only one ride-hailing company, only one group-buying platform - that’s when it’s time to harvest. However, we can also find that they are not in a hurry to harvest, but instead harvest only some people through algorithms. On one hand, they earn excess profits from pricing power, and on the other hand, they use low prices for new products to block new entrants, guarding against every potential competitor. These large corporations have formed a de facto monopoly, and whether they harvest the “leeks” is just a matter of time.
In our work, we also encounter many “kings of involution.” It’s hard to evaluate whether they bring more value, but what they can clearly do is always leave work half an hour later than others. Once two “kings of involution” get competitive, the “give a little more” interlocks, and the entire office is shrouded in their shadow. They rely on this low-quality service to squeeze the living space of normal workers. The competition is neither about innovation nor performance, but mainly about “selling hard labor,” yet they can win the boss’s favor. This is clearly an abnormal, vicious competition.
Finally, returning to the crayfish market, some can monopolize pricing and set their own prices, some can monopolize supply for the high-end market, but who can achieve monopolizing labor while working spontaneously?