Did for me. On Android, chrome. This is weird. Several times now I have either bypassed the paywall or got hit with it clicking the title link on different posts. Anyone know what's up with this?
The VC model necessitates throwing things that seem insane but have huge potential against the wall and seeing what sticks. On the off chance that they're right, everyone involved will profit handsomely.
Good idea. Bathrooms are under utilized, same for kitchens.
But it's a nightmare sharing with people who are strangers without some sort of authority to appeal to for noise / filth / shitty behaviour.
EDIT: seems people disagree. Well I've spent 2 years as a mature student living in that exact sort of housing in two different places. One with en-suite and one with shared bathroom.
Getting stuff clean and not having noise are constant irritations. Good luck getting the 6 friends sharing a dorm below you to keep the noise down.
Sure but it is the same challenge that exist with Road Congestion, Public Transport and countless of other services where there is a recurrent rush of influx at precise time. Trying sharing the same bathroom with three other adult working 9-5, whom aren't your friend or family members.
From experience I would say a room + en-suite bathroom is the only way to stay sane.
The grind of the kitchen wears you down. Where I am now my roommate cleans his plate when he is preparing his next meal so there is always one dirty plate on the side in the kitchen. The stovetop always has bits of food on it.
One gets tired of saying "Can you not?" because it is petty and you become a pain in the ass.
I've stayed in plenty of hostels too. People there will leave what they can get away with but the occasional member of staff is enough to keep things in check.
I would be all for this kind of living arrangement if the "can you not" was externalised to an authority figure to whom you could complain anonymously.
I also sleep with foam earplugs in. Thank goodness for health and safety at work :) The noise isn't enough to warrant real complaint - just people living and having fun. I guess plenty of people live with that. My actual home is silent so when I'm on the road I notice the bustle.
And here is another statement to confirm that no matter what sector VC is "reinventing", "disrupting" or "whatever is the latest buzzword" greed always comes first.
I live in 2 km² mansion, but you know guys I have these nice dorms for you to squeeze in...
I'm not usually one to appeal to classism, but it did make me laugh that Mr. Zuckerberg is buying up neighbouring properties around his multi-million dollar mansion, so as not to be disturbed by people in the vicinity. Meanwhile, Facebook employees are jammed into 200 square-foot dormitories.
Also, to be fair, Zuckerberg is likely a high-risk target from a security perspective. Famous and Rich? There's gotta be someone who wants to leverage that
2. They built the Panoramic in the time it took WeLive to do their interior improvements. And when they were working on it, it was just a skeleton crew. The whole time I was thinking ... how are they financing the building? This is insane.
3. WeLive has a main floor common space, where they've had two? events since they opened. Both were modestly attended, but certainly had a college dorm feel to it. Not anything anyone over 30 would be interested in.
4. There appears to be value-added services in the common area, a cafe, a juice bar, etc, but I hardly see it used.
5. They continue to putter around the building, putting a whole new set of scaffolding up, taking it down, putting it up again, doing some painting, taking the taping down, putting it up again, and I wonder ... what on earth are they doing? They had a year to get this right, what's the hold up.
6. Compared to the huge number of apartments going in across the street -- 1900? WeLive is a ghost town.
(ps. the Trinity has major problems going in to this as well. I see it as a huge bungle for the Planners. But I am waiting to see what the Market Street retail looks like. If it's anything like the Mission Street side, it'll keep that side of Market dead.)
So, in short, WeLive is some capital intensive problems, that a lot of smart people are trying to solve, just up the block and across the street, and nothing I see puts WeLive ahead of these guys.
Especially when landlords stop leasing to them at .5x, so that they can turn around and dormify the building and get 2x for it. Not with Panorama and Trinity right there.
> 4. There appears to be value-added services in the common area, a cafe, a juice bar, etc, but I hardly see it used.
Value added? Maybe, I guess. It's really just another way to drain more money from the tenants in the name of convenience. Dorm room too small for a coffee maker? Just pay $4 per cup in our handy cafe.
I wonder where the threshold is for people who would live in a situation like this. Is living in SF such a necessity? If you're consumed most of the day with your startup to begin with, how much of the city's culture are you really going to take in? Especially if you're in one of these dorms, where they drop a cafe and juice bar right in the building "so you never have to leave!"
I love the first video. The apartments are lovely, lots of light, a lot of thinking about the usability and comfort went into it. If I was single in my 20s I'd love to live in a place like that (as opposed to same dingy 800sqf with nasty wall-to-wall carpets in a generic apartment complex somewhere in middle America, which is what I actually did).
Super interesting video! I love seeing entrepreneurship flourish within regulatory constraints. There is so much innovation going on with those micro apartments and public spaces, it's really exciting.
Farther into the video, he shows the common areas and mentions some of the psychology that goes into the planning of the space.
He's also experimenting with the living space to figure out what's best while being as small as possible. The level of thought that goes into it is impressive.
You mean every single company building electronics in China? "Companies like Apple" includes effectively every single company making electronics at a large scale.
UPDATE: I am hearing from many people in America, "this looks tough." I am hearing from many people who have seen other Chinese factories, "this looks pretty good." More on this too -- and while I'm saving "what it all means" comments for later, I'll say that I've seen enough other Chinese factories, rural schools, villages and so on to recognize that these are on the higher end of the spectrum.
It might seem bad, but Foxconn is actually one of the better choices for outsourcing in terms of working conditions. People in the US sometimes chose situations like that simply to send more money home.
PS: Or for the extreme version, hot bunking is still a thing for US subs. Where people on different shifts use the same bed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_rackingWith more than one crew member assigned to a rack, it is possible that a crew member returning from a duty shift will lie down on a rack immediately after it is vacated by another crew member about to start a shift. The rack is therefore said to be "hot", that is, still warm from the vacating crew member's body heat. The term could also apply to individuals who get into the rack right off of duty without showering and smelling like a "hot" mess.
Top comment on the article:
FRANK DEUTSCHMANN
"Ah, the return of the rooming house - a fitting capstone for the Obama presidency. Yeah, he caused that."
I didn't know the rooming house had gone away, for one thing. For another, this sounds less like the boarding house my father lived in than the group houses my friends I lived in. Obama wasn't born in my father's boarding house days, and I don't think he was out of college when I lived in group houses.
They usually call college "the best time of your life," not dorm living. Most college kids don't stay in dorms past their freshman year, and the ones that do don't have nearly as much fun as the ones who find off-campus accommodations. (Dorms in many schools, especially state schools, often forbid alcohol.)
I don't know, don't tenements generally have "familial unit" rooms? The rooms are shared, but usually not with strangers or on a large scale. Barracks or "worker dormitories" fit better.
I like your "worker dormitories". Alternatives include rooming house, single room occupancy (SRO), flophouse, communal apartment, and cohousing, depending on the details.
I've lived in houses with up to 4 other people. When I travel, I frequently use hostels. This sounds like an interesting concept if executed well. The main reason I eventually moved into a two bedroom apartment was more to have a better location and nicer place than to get away from people.
How many resources do we waste on underutilized space? The US is more extreme here than any other country I've heard of.
In most places, suburbs are not the problem. There is plenty of land open for sprawl and with modern telecommute technologies, there's no need to clog up the roadways with traffic. TinyVillages looks like a well-meaning concept but it neglects the key reasons suburbs exist: people really like having a lot of space to themselves. Things that ignore what people actually want usually don't do well.
You are ignoring the big issue of over-priced urban centers. In cities people live in apartments happily. So not everyone needs a large home.
There is plenty of room for suburban sprawl, but many cities desperately need an alternative to large houses and suburbs. I have provided it. You and others are not able to recognize it because it is actually a novel idea.
Some people may live in apartments happily forever, but most humans intend to pair off and reproduce at some point or another. Units like this may be suited to the types of people who already live in dorms, but on top of the fact that people prefer to have a lot of space, they're not a good solution to the type of housing that's needed to accommodate most human families over the long term. That means the populations that rent will be transient, making it even less desirable as no real sense of continuity or community history will exist there. Now there are 3 big factors working against it: it's too small to start with, it won't accommodate people as they form families, and because of 1 and 2, it will have a high turnover rate, which makes for disinterested and fatigued neighbors. It doesn't work.
As many other commenters in this thread have indicated, this is not a new idea by any means. There are many examples of tiny units and condensed urban spaces all over the world, and they're not popular.
Some 3 person families will be fine living in a 512 square foot home. That's not too uncommon globally. For a family we could also have double or triple sized units if that's what people want.
The units I portrayed are nothing like dorms and they are not apartments, so you probably didn't actually read it. Anyway it really doesn't matter what you think. Since this whole concept is in fact a new idea, it will be quite hard to market and easy for the average person such as yourself to dismiss.
I think you need to work on taking criticism on your project. No matter how right you may or may not be, dismissing the average Joe and claiming that he's just too simple to grasp the concept is only going to keep things difficult for you. If you want to be successful, your average customer is going to be an average person, and you'll have to meet that person where they're at, not yell at them for being too dumb to understand your brand new concept. Doing that is a stereotypical sign of severe self-delusion.
If your site cannot explain the concept in an approachable way, saying "you're just too dumb to get it" isn't going to help. If you find that you have to say this to someone, it means that YOU'RE the person with the communication problem, not them. This is a very important principle to understand as you seek to gain traction for your concept. Instead of blaming people for their opinions, understand that this is a real, organic impression of the project and that it's likely representative of what at least some random segment of the population is going to think. You'd be wise to note the concerns and work toward addressing them.
I didn't read the full page word for word, no, but I did spend a good 3-4 minutes skimming it, and I watched the embedded video, which is much more than most people who come across a random website do. Please find a good mentor who can help you take criticism without being dismissive of a potential customer who is providing feedback.
You didn't take enough time to really understand it as evidenced by your comments. You were dismissive and disrespectful, and have continued that in all of your comments.
A bit like the problem dating apps have, the more successful you are, the more churn you create.
Once a group of friends come together they'll get a house share of their own instead of sharing with strangers. Probably be cheaper too. Have they modeled for high churn rates in their already thin margins?
A premium service leaves your very vulnerable to the tide going out on disposable income. The co-living space will be left with higher long term leases they can no longer service. I really want to figure out a way to short services like WeWork at a 16b valuation.
Speaking of dating apps, the worst part about dorm life was hearing people have sex or making sure your roommate knows not to walk in when they see a sock on the door.
If I were single and working 80 hours a week so my boss's boss can make billions on an IPO while I end up with barely enough to afford a Bay Area house, then maybe I would consider these arrangements for a little while. But instead I have a girlfriend and we value certain things more than money.
> Speaking of dating apps, the worst part about dorm life was hearing people have sex or making sure your roommate knows not to walk in when they see a sock on the door.
Wait, what? I always thought the sock on the door was the signal to join in.
I thought this was going to be about the Draper University of Heroes [1], which looks like a competing space for wantrepreneurs fond of close-quarters living spaces. That one looks even more prestigious, but apparently you also have to take an oath to gain entry. Maybe a great option if you're within the age limit (18-28) and you're long on dreams but short on self-respect.
Seriously VCs, what are you guys thinking? These poor kids.
Unlike traditional investments in the real-estate sector, which tends to be a slow-growth market with moderate returns, financial backers including Fidelity Investments and consumer-focused venture-capital fund Maveron are betting on hyper-fast expansion and startup-like profit.
"Startup-like profit"? So they plan to lose money for as long as investors will continue to write them checks?
If I had to hazard, the profit being referring to is the type where the company has profit potential on razor thin margins and requires massive cash infusions to grow it to numbers where the margins are substantial and support an exit. As long as those "curves" work for those who have money, their money will flow.
I've hypothesized that technology bubbles are created by injecting large amounts of stored work (causality) into a system. Stock market, dotcom bubble, Bitcoin, fuses in your breaker box, etc. In some cases, this stored work allows for the creation of trust channels. These trust channels are not always trustworthy. Consider poker games.
I no longer trust VCs because I think their "game" is driven by a very small set of limited partner's desire to make even more money than they already have or need. That they are willing to stuff a whole generation into a dorm on the "ifs and buts" of an exit is ridiculous.
This "gotta have more" strategy isn't holistic and isn't scalable. When it pops, it's going to be messy.
Bootstrap it. Move home, if you must. Move to to a cheap Asian country and build your dream. Whatever you do, do it with your eyes open and your mind free of dissonance. And remember, profit puts you in charge, not them.
Given sites have started blocking people from reading the story, even if you Google the title, I think we should stop posting links to them. I can't read the article, and if someone else posts the content here, that's not a tenable solution.
Well the difference is that hippies were interested in communal living for the communal aspect, VCs are because they can't quite go full capsule[0] yet. If these pan out, I expect the next frontier will be capsule TEU[1] on rust buckets in the bay.
People associated with the hippie movement / sympathetic to its ideals have made massive, massive contributions to the history of personal computing. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said
That being said, both legalized weed and communal living are perfect examples of how counterculture ideas can become co-opted and corrupted by establishment greed.
This is related to a concept I've been thinking about for a while due to some trends I've seen in Boston.
Suppose you work for Acme Co. Acme Co is a multi national conglomerate.
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries operates the public transportation you use to get to work (The commuter trains in MA are operated by a private company)
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries owns the building you live in (this is particularly interesting because the trend in Boston has been for real estate investment trusts to buy up large swaths of smaller multi family homes for their portfolio, homes that were typically used as owner occupied means of wealth generation)
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the energy supplier you pay for electricity
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the cable company you pay for TV and internet
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the insurance company you use for your car/property/health insurance
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the charter school network you send your kids to
That we are very bad at remembering our history.
Another post mentions the company town. As a resident of Rochester, NY, I can not help but think of the housing developments that were built by Kodak for employees in the company's height.
Being completely dependent on a single company like this for everything is not something I'd want to be a part of. Not unless the company had a strong commitment to its employees. My grandfather was a clothes washer repairman for many years, but eventually, his job became obsolete. In today's economy, the company would have "thanked him for his life" and then seen him to the door like a robber. In his case, the company invested in training him for another position. Without a strong commitment, this situation sets up a dependence that reduces a person's ability to handle transitioning when he leaves the company.
The self-named village that the Kohler Company (you've probably used their toilets or back-up generators at some point in your life) headquarters resides in is a good example. From what I understand, even today if you move there, you rent the property your house is on from the company, and the company has authority over aesthetics of house and business changes/renovations.
Welcome to South Korea, where you can be born in a chaebol-owned hospital, work for a chaebol subsidiary, live in a chaebol-owned apartment, carry a phone made by your chaebol, with service provided by your chaebol, and bank at the chaebol bank.
Shuts down social mobility. Acme helps raise the children of coal miners to be the coal miners of tomorrow, etc. They know how much you make and how much you can afford to spend, etc. There are a lot of reasons this model is a historical footnote.
A Corporate Republic (from Civilization: Call to Power, one of the government types available in the Genetic Age).
"The Imperial Trading Companies such as the various East India Companies should possibly be considered corporate states, being semi-sovereign with the power to wage war and establish colonies."
I can't read this article because it's behind a paywall. Does this mean these dorms are owned by the employer in the same way a school owns the dorms that students live in? What happens when the employee is fired/let go? Now they are out of a job AND have no place to live?
Yes, but that has a decidedly Scandinavian twist of putting young people together with wise village elders. It has a kind of sheen of hopefulness that we just don't see in the States (because -- as clearly demonstrated with this dorm idea -- apparently profit here is worth cramming adults into Soviet-style people storage with value-add juice bars).
This is actually an amazing idea on so many levels. Everyone wins in this model: improved quality of life for the elderly, better housing for young people than they could afford on their own, improved density for city planners, increased social cohesion.
Unbelievable, I had exactly the same idea a few months ago. To live in a retirement home for a year as a young person, and spend time getting to know the residents, while also going to work at a regular job. I thought it could also make an awesome story for a book or a documentary.
I've noticed that it won't work for most sites (for me, in Chrome at least) unless I open the web link in an incognito window.
I assume it's related to cookies / referrer in some way
159 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 205 ms ] threadhttp://www.wsj.com/articles/venture-capitals-answer-to-high-...
I may be stupid, but how is charging a premium an answer to high prices?
Most will do what they've always done - house or apartment share.
But it's a nightmare sharing with people who are strangers without some sort of authority to appeal to for noise / filth / shitty behaviour.
EDIT: seems people disagree. Well I've spent 2 years as a mature student living in that exact sort of housing in two different places. One with en-suite and one with shared bathroom.
Getting stuff clean and not having noise are constant irritations. Good luck getting the 6 friends sharing a dorm below you to keep the noise down.
From experience I would say a room + en-suite bathroom is the only way to stay sane.
The grind of the kitchen wears you down. Where I am now my roommate cleans his plate when he is preparing his next meal so there is always one dirty plate on the side in the kitchen. The stovetop always has bits of food on it.
One gets tired of saying "Can you not?" because it is petty and you become a pain in the ass.
I've stayed in plenty of hostels too. People there will leave what they can get away with but the occasional member of staff is enough to keep things in check.
I would be all for this kind of living arrangement if the "can you not" was externalised to an authority figure to whom you could complain anonymously.
I also sleep with foam earplugs in. Thank goodness for health and safety at work :) The noise isn't enough to warrant real complaint - just people living and having fun. I guess plenty of people live with that. My actual home is silent so when I'm on the road I notice the bustle.
I live in 2 km² mansion, but you know guys I have these nice dorms for you to squeeze in...
Someone wanted to buy and then resell his neighbor's home with a selling point of living next to Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg also rents the houses back to the original owners.
http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-buys-4-homes-...
Sounds like a twisted reverse mortgage scheme where you get to pay rent on your old property as well.
Is this what is called financial innovation?
1. Similar models are popping up all over the city, including the much more sophisticated Panoramic just up a block. Beds starting at $1500. Yes Beds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LI0tqVmGtI
2. They built the Panoramic in the time it took WeLive to do their interior improvements. And when they were working on it, it was just a skeleton crew. The whole time I was thinking ... how are they financing the building? This is insane.
3. WeLive has a main floor common space, where they've had two? events since they opened. Both were modestly attended, but certainly had a college dorm feel to it. Not anything anyone over 30 would be interested in.
4. There appears to be value-added services in the common area, a cafe, a juice bar, etc, but I hardly see it used.
5. They continue to putter around the building, putting a whole new set of scaffolding up, taking it down, putting it up again, doing some painting, taking the taping down, putting it up again, and I wonder ... what on earth are they doing? They had a year to get this right, what's the hold up.
6. Compared to the huge number of apartments going in across the street -- 1900? WeLive is a ghost town.
http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-planners-back...
(ps. the Trinity has major problems going in to this as well. I see it as a huge bungle for the Planners. But I am waiting to see what the Market Street retail looks like. If it's anything like the Mission Street side, it'll keep that side of Market dead.)
So, in short, WeLive is some capital intensive problems, that a lot of smart people are trying to solve, just up the block and across the street, and nothing I see puts WeLive ahead of these guys.
Especially when landlords stop leasing to them at .5x, so that they can turn around and dormify the building and get 2x for it. Not with Panorama and Trinity right there.
Value added? Maybe, I guess. It's really just another way to drain more money from the tenants in the name of convenience. Dorm room too small for a coffee maker? Just pay $4 per cup in our handy cafe.
I wonder where the threshold is for people who would live in a situation like this. Is living in SF such a necessity? If you're consumed most of the day with your startup to begin with, how much of the city's culture are you really going to take in? Especially if you're in one of these dorms, where they drop a cafe and juice bar right in the building "so you never have to leave!"
He's also experimenting with the living space to figure out what's best while being as small as possible. The level of thought that goes into it is impressive.
And there's the problem. For $500? Sure, I'll do that.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/10/ins...
It might seem bad, but Foxconn is actually one of the better choices for outsourcing in terms of working conditions. People in the US sometimes chose situations like that simply to send more money home.
PS: Or for the extreme version, hot bunking is still a thing for US subs. Where people on different shifts use the same bed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_racking With more than one crew member assigned to a rack, it is possible that a crew member returning from a duty shift will lie down on a rack immediately after it is vacated by another crew member about to start a shift. The rack is therefore said to be "hot", that is, still warm from the vacating crew member's body heat. The term could also apply to individuals who get into the rack right off of duty without showering and smelling like a "hot" mess.
I think layman translation of this marketing bullshit is "barrack"
http://i.imgur.com/UB56u0G.jpg
How many resources do we waste on underutilized space? The US is more extreme here than any other country I've heard of.
http://tinyvillages.org
There is plenty of room for suburban sprawl, but many cities desperately need an alternative to large houses and suburbs. I have provided it. You and others are not able to recognize it because it is actually a novel idea.
As many other commenters in this thread have indicated, this is not a new idea by any means. There are many examples of tiny units and condensed urban spaces all over the world, and they're not popular.
The units I portrayed are nothing like dorms and they are not apartments, so you probably didn't actually read it. Anyway it really doesn't matter what you think. Since this whole concept is in fact a new idea, it will be quite hard to market and easy for the average person such as yourself to dismiss.
If your site cannot explain the concept in an approachable way, saying "you're just too dumb to get it" isn't going to help. If you find that you have to say this to someone, it means that YOU'RE the person with the communication problem, not them. This is a very important principle to understand as you seek to gain traction for your concept. Instead of blaming people for their opinions, understand that this is a real, organic impression of the project and that it's likely representative of what at least some random segment of the population is going to think. You'd be wise to note the concerns and work toward addressing them.
I didn't read the full page word for word, no, but I did spend a good 3-4 minutes skimming it, and I watched the embedded video, which is much more than most people who come across a random website do. Please find a good mentor who can help you take criticism without being dismissive of a potential customer who is providing feedback.
You were never a potential customer.
Once a group of friends come together they'll get a house share of their own instead of sharing with strangers. Probably be cheaper too. Have they modeled for high churn rates in their already thin margins?
A premium service leaves your very vulnerable to the tide going out on disposable income. The co-living space will be left with higher long term leases they can no longer service. I really want to figure out a way to short services like WeWork at a 16b valuation.
If I were single and working 80 hours a week so my boss's boss can make billions on an IPO while I end up with barely enough to afford a Bay Area house, then maybe I would consider these arrangements for a little while. But instead I have a girlfriend and we value certain things more than money.
Wait, what? I always thought the sock on the door was the signal to join in.
You were one of those roommates, weren't you?
Seriously VCs, what are you guys thinking? These poor kids.
[1] http://blog.sfgate.com/pender/2013/07/28/tim-drapers-boardin...
"Startup-like profit"? So they plan to lose money for as long as investors will continue to write them checks?
I've hypothesized that technology bubbles are created by injecting large amounts of stored work (causality) into a system. Stock market, dotcom bubble, Bitcoin, fuses in your breaker box, etc. In some cases, this stored work allows for the creation of trust channels. These trust channels are not always trustworthy. Consider poker games.
I no longer trust VCs because I think their "game" is driven by a very small set of limited partner's desire to make even more money than they already have or need. That they are willing to stuff a whole generation into a dorm on the "ifs and buts" of an exit is ridiculous.
This "gotta have more" strategy isn't holistic and isn't scalable. When it pops, it's going to be messy.
Bootstrap it. Move home, if you must. Move to to a cheap Asian country and build your dream. Whatever you do, do it with your eyes open and your mind free of dissonance. And remember, profit puts you in charge, not them.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsule_hotel
[1] http://capsulecontainer.com/capspace.html
That being said, both legalized weed and communal living are perfect examples of how counterculture ideas can become co-opted and corrupted by establishment greed.
As the old joke goes, "the two biggest things to come out of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. This is probably not a coincidence."
Suppose you work for Acme Co. Acme Co is a multi national conglomerate.
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries operates the public transportation you use to get to work (The commuter trains in MA are operated by a private company)
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries owns the building you live in (this is particularly interesting because the trend in Boston has been for real estate investment trusts to buy up large swaths of smaller multi family homes for their portfolio, homes that were typically used as owner occupied means of wealth generation)
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the energy supplier you pay for electricity
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the cable company you pay for TV and internet
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the insurance company you use for your car/property/health insurance
- One of Acme Cos subsidiaries is the charter school network you send your kids to
- etc
Anyone else see this trend? What's the end game?
Being completely dependent on a single company like this for everything is not something I'd want to be a part of. Not unless the company had a strong commitment to its employees. My grandfather was a clothes washer repairman for many years, but eventually, his job became obsolete. In today's economy, the company would have "thanked him for his life" and then seen him to the door like a robber. In his case, the company invested in training him for another position. Without a strong commitment, this situation sets up a dependence that reduces a person's ability to handle transitioning when he leaves the company.
Shuts down social mobility. Acme helps raise the children of coal miners to be the coal miners of tomorrow, etc. They know how much you make and how much you can afford to spend, etc. There are a lot of reasons this model is a historical footnote.
"I owe my soul to the company store." We've been here before: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zE1-48AAYc
"The Imperial Trading Companies such as the various East India Companies should possibly be considered corporate states, being semi-sovereign with the power to wage war and establish colonies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_republic
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seibu_Holdings
If you click on "web" next to "flag" and "past", you'll be able to access an unpaywalled version of the article by clicking through the first link.
Clicking through to web doesn't work for me anymore. Even if I open in an incognito window, it won't let me read the whole thing.
But, it seems like VC's have rediscovered that cutting edge Victorian technology, the boarding house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boarding_house
Click "web" link below this thread title to open up Google search. Then follow the first link.