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The Lesson Applejack Never Learned, Part 3
02/12/12(Sun)17:49 No.34230407Now, this last point may have been a purposeful act on the part of the Apple family, working up fervor over their product by reducing supply far below the known and accepted demand, but economically this could only hurt them in the end due to customer frustration. The consumers would then have no recourse, except if somepony else came along to break up their monopoly, which is just what the brothers Flim and Flam threatened to do. Until their arrival, the Apples held Ponyville in their mafia-like hooves by controlling the sole source and means of apple production in Ponyville but when a more efficient counter-business model arrived, they were flummoxed.
What Applejack didn't learn from her experience--what she SHOULD have learned--was that bad friendships don't necessarily lead to bad business partnerships. The Flim Flam brothers were undeniably over-aggressive with their business model when they tried to threaten to drive the Apples out of business, but, as shown above, with even a cursory examination their threat was hollow; Had the Apples put aside their arrogance and looked at the whole thing from a business standpoint, they would have realized this. (This same arrogance is what the brothers play on to goad them into the all-or-nothing contest to begin with.) Had they negotiated with the brothers and come up with a more reasonable split of profits, the Apples would have been able to meet Ponyville's demand easily, the SSSS6K could have been modified to match the Apple family recipe, and both parties could have profited from their invention.
Instead, the Apples fled from the opportunities of industrialization and, as a result, stayed trapped in their dark age methods of production, barely surviving as a business by sheer luck while stridently refusing to observe the threat that the shot across the bow the Flim Flam brothers delivered represented.
In the end, my only question is WHAT ARE WE TEACHING LITTLE GIRLS NOWADAYS? |
