Hunger Is A Flattening Circle

A Cessna flyover of human history would suggest that our species is something of a mixed bag. Our technological and social progress is as undeniable as our inter-traumatization is, and the conditions we emerged from many millennia ago left scarring in our collective consciousness so deep that our self-medicative attempts to relieve its pressure have often led to volcanic results. At a macro level we can see this by studying the staggering complexity of the supply chains we’re able to construct to distribute seemingly-infinite resources, and then observing the persistence of food deserts, modern starvations, and astronomical mountains of proceeds in a handful of bank accounts. At a micro level we can notice the ways in which we strain and grasp and bargain and manipulate to get whatever it is we think we are missing. At every level or scale, we still act out our ancient terror of starvation, and our insistence an recreating those conditions despite our surrounding abundance is profound.

Or whatever. I was thinking about that while I was whirring my matcha around in a cup this morning with one of those little mixers they send you when you spend too much money on green tea. For some reason they refuse to turn the motor down in those by like 15% so the liquid doesn’t fly all over the kitchen, but I’ve managed to adjust along the way and seem to be OK with them now. I wrote a long email in about it awhile back, not angry at all but just sort of a “can you tell the manufacturer to get these things to relax please” sort of thing. I never heard back, which I guess isn’t surprising and also why would I, but I think the real answer is something like this:

1. Lets say you had a bulk mixer order of 200,000 (usually manufacturing things comes with an minimum order requirement and new products will stick with that amount unless the company has a reliable way to forecast demand. So in this case, let’s say the MOQ is 200k units).

2. Let’s say it costs $10 per unit to make the mixer. That’s $2mm for the order assuming shipping and fulfillment is baked into the unit pricing.

3. Maybe it costs $15 per unit to make a mixer with a little slider on it that adjusts the speed. The sort of function either requires a different motor completely or the same motor design with additional components that can adjust its output on demand.

4. And maybe they’ve got 180,000 unshipped units from the initial mixer order in their warehouse.

5. Making a change while they have inventory left would require throwing out 180,000 motors and taking a $1.8mm loss on their books either immediately or gradually, and then creating a new expense of $2.5mm to make the new mixers at the same volume.

6. Making a change after they ship the remaining existing inventory would mean future orders would eat into their margins, and if this product is accounted for as a retention incentive for a subscription product (i.e. you just started your 4th month with us or whatever) then that will further impact the business because the margin its eating is in its recurring revenue engine which tends to carry a big chunk of the company’s valuation.

7. So, they’d track customer complaints about the mixer and establish a percentage line at which they feel that keeping the product quality as is is a bigger danger to growth and revenue than changing it would be. That might be 15% of customers complain about it, 20%, etc it’s complex and dependent on a lot of factors.

8. And if my email falls into a percentage below that line, then they’ll say something to the effect of thanks for your feedback we value your input and we’ll look to improve in the future and most likely not ever do anything about it.

As a quick aside, there are more steps in there than what I outlined but it’s a holiday weekend and I wasn’t planning on spending it talking about unit economics. But here’s my point. The above is something close to how most product companies evaluate whether to care about customer product feedback on a product quality issue, and its worth outlining only because of what I was getting at in the first paragraph.

There is very little in the modern Western world that isn’t run like a business at this point, which means much of what feels beautiful about being human or of moral importance gets filtered into some form of cost/value analysis before anything else happens. That isn’t necessarily always a bad thing, that framework as an abstraction can fit well into a healthy logical framework, but the point of a company is to maximize shareholder value. That’s what a company does and why it exists. And that’s why arguing that everything should be run like it’s a company can lead to some dark places, just like other frameworks with different particular bents have also led to dark places.

And I bring that up just because it gets at the root of a lot of why so much human suffering still exists at scale. Let’s connect two points together here:

1. Humanity is still terrified of starvation and focused on survival, on both conscious and subconscious levels. The abundance and access that technological advancement have provided to the modern world have either not soaked in yet to the core of our awareness, or we’re all carrying a certain amount of PTSD at a genetic level and continue to behave like we’re still in the ancient animalistic war for survival regardless of our surroundings.

2. Companies exist to create shareholder value, and were created as a more effective vehicle for survival and alleviating the other fears outlined in point 1 than an individual could accomplish on their own.

If those 2 basic things were true, maybe I’m wrong about either, then it becomes very easy to explain a great deal of things. Why is there no middle class in the music industry? Because an ecosystem whose majority is comprised mainly of pretty successful musicians/bands doesn’t maximize major or mid-level labels’ shareholder value. Why haven’t we solved world hunger? Because it doesn’t maximize agricultural companies’ shareholder value. Why has universal healthcare been villainized for decades? Because it doesn’t maximize healthcare companies’ shareholder value. Why are we constantly fighting foreign wars? Why did oil companies spend many decades denying environmental impact of their products? WHY IS THERE MATCHA ALL OVER MY FUCKING COUNTERTOP AGAIN? Etc. And the fix, ultimately, is probably finding a way to get our species out of fight or flight mode at scale. Naïve I know but we’ll see.

Anyway, this is what happens when I try to mix matcha alone while my girlfriend is gone having the best weekend of her life at a Taylor Swift concert. The danger of being left to my own devices has probably never been this literal before and I’m grateful for you following along on my strange tangent here. Happy Saturday and don’t be good.