This forum, once a place for optimism and learning from each other, has degenerated into a place for demanding unionization, government regulation, and a general tearing down of the very people who created microstock.

Those people put their blood sweat and tears into creating new businesses that were long shots.  They invested significant sums of their own money or worked hard to secure financing.  They hired staffs, secured help from accountants and lawyers, spent significant sums on advertising, set up infrastructures (software, servers, etc.)  In every case, these business owners took a big gamble.  Some succeeded and some didn't. 

That's called capitalism.

You too are a capitalist.  You are creating a product, sending it out into a marketplace, and expecting to profit from it.  You control your destiny.  You are your own boss.  You are a grown-up.  You entered into agreements with those other capitalists, the microstock agencies, to sell your work.  They are providing a service to you, and taking between 65 and 85% of the sale price, in exchange for the marketplace they created and all the associated costs of putting your product in front of buyers, facilitating sales, and putting the money into your pocket. 

You are free to believe those services ARE or ARE NOT worth 65 to 85% of the sale prices, and have those agencies work on your behalf.  And you're just as free to say that you're better off finding another solution, maybe starting your own agency, perhaps setting up your own website to sell your own work.

You are free to raise the funds needed to start your own venture, to hire a staff, pay for lawyers, accountants, advertising, servers, programmers, etc.  Make no mistake, it's a lot of work, and it takes a lot of money to do it right.    You either have the stomach and the pockets to do what the agencies are doing, or you don't and you agree to their terms in exchange for their services.  Or you do neither and find another income stream/field of work that you believe will treat you more fairly. 

The point is: you're FREE TO MAKE YOUR OWN CHOICE.  Don't feel stuck in one or the other scenario and complain about it endlessly.  Make a decision you feel is best for you and focus all your energies into making it the most rewarding arrangement for all involved.  Do you really feel it's right to enter into an arrangement with a business with the idea that you will both benefit, then trash that partner at every opportunity?  Please, just walk away.  Or at least stop crying about how you're being taken taken advantage of.  Are you a slave?  Just walk away.

When I set up accounts at these agencies, I knew what I would be selling was a COMMODITY.  I accepted that it wasn't much different from producing a product and getting it into WalMart and having to agree to their terms to get onto their shelves.  As long as my margins were good enough I could meet my own revenue goals, and I would feel fairly rewarded.  I've gone into this with a capitalist mentality, and perhaps that attitude has helped me do well.  Ultimately, I recognize that the microstocks have made it possible for me to make a living at this, and I think it's about time I stepped up and spoke out in their defense since no one else is.

Thank you for hearing me out.  Now you can get back to calling for a microstocker's union to protect you from the greedy pigs stealing your money.  Or get back to uploading your next batch.  Or, most likely, both.

I believe capitalism works well but needs some regulation/rules or union opposition.  Just look at the mess the banks got in to after years of deregulation.  There are several industries where the suppliers have been squeezed so hard they can barely survive while others are making huge profits from them.  I have never joined a union but if that's the only way to put the brakes on the sites moving further towards taking nearly all our earnings, then I'm interested.

We aren't really free to start our own site.  Who here has the money to do that?  A few of the big contributors could but they are either satisfied with their earnings or are moving on to macro.  In a perfect world, we could all go to a site that pays a decent commission and take all the buyers with us but that isn't going to happen.  I wish it would but too many people go along with whatever changes the sites make until its too late to do anything about it.

This forum, once a place for optimism and learning from each other, has degenerated into a place for demanding unionization, government regulation, and a general tearing down of the very people who created microstock.

Nope, generally the lament is how far the vision has moved from that of the 'very people who created microstock'.

You're right, each to their own destiny. But, I like the fact that peope can vent here. A lot of photographers work alone. People in corporate offices, can go to lunch or drinks after work to vent and share their frustrations about their company; changes, no raises, over worked, etc. This forum offers that "lunch/drinks" opportunity with others that are experiencing the same things.

I have found a lot of positive things here. Even the negative is a positive. We get the chance to learn from others mistakes. The shared knowledge of good, bad, and otherwise makes this community, well, a community.

I for one am very appreciative of all the information available on these forums, no matter what form they take.

What on earth is the point of joining the forums and starting a post to complain that we're all a bunch of whiners?

What on earth is the point of joining the forums and starting a post to complain that we're all a bunch of whiners?

Here here. I understand that many blogs, forums, review sites are spiked by bogus individuals trying to sway opinion. Not like I sense that happening with this post. It's far too objectively written for that to have happened. Surely you have better things to do in that Ivory Tower of yours.

I realize that there is a lot of negative posts on this forum and this is the only place a lot of them can vent their frustrations,just as you can, but to the OP you have to realize that many contributors rely on their income from microstock and iStock is one place that trapped many contributors with their promises of bigger commissions for those who went exclusive with a deadline of August 31st just one month before their big announcement. That is why people want them to be accountable for what they have done. They would have known what was going on before the announcement. If their business was losing money by keeping the current commission rate earned by the different canister levels then why in the world would they want more to join just to take higher commissions? If that isn't misleading on their part I don't know what is. That's what it's all about. Many of the exclusives can't just pack up and leave because they have no portfolios anywhere else because of the broken promises.

Quote from: stockmarketer on November 09, 2010, 01:02

The point is: you're FREE TO MAKE YOUR OWN CHOICE.  Don't feel stuck in one or the other scenario and complain about it endlessly.  Make a decision you feel is best for you and focus all your energies into making it the most rewarding arrangement for all involved.  Do you really feel it's right to enter into an arrangement with a business with the idea that you will both benefit, then trash that partner at every opportunity?  Please, just walk away.  Or at least stop crying about how you're being taken taken advantage of.  Are you a slave?  Just walk away.

Microstock - Love It or Leave It.     

I always get the biggest kick out of people who come in forums to bitch and moan about all the bitching and moaning.  And they do it without the slightest trace of irony or self-awareness.  LOL!

If you don't want to read our crying and moaning, according to your own argument, you should walk away.  Right? 

Right on the money Lisa....

You reckon this person is a undercover spy for iStock...

@stockmarketer - I hope you realize that you're railing against the vast minority of microstock artists. Very few participate in these forums, and even fewer agree with the calls to unionize. Even those who say they'd support a union probably wouldn't back it in any financial way. The minute that union puts out a call for donations or dues, I think very few people would still believe in the union.

Most of us are well aware that microstock is a very solitary business, where we each make business decisions that suit our individual needs and goals best. And a union is the last thing most of us would want, despite what the vocal minority in these forums might otherwise suggest.

LOL ...I guess the cat is out of the bag...right! stockmarketer

Hi Lobo.. welcome to MSG where you dont have the power to shut down complaints in the forum.

I doubt it's Lobo - he already has an account here as pieman.

But it would be a refreshing change to know who is behind the curtain when these finger-wagging folks come to tell us all what we should be doing and thinking...

stockmarketer,

Maybe what you are missing is that our complaints are about changes implemented by the sites.  We signed up under some agreement terms, we invested our time in uploads, and all of a sudden they make changes.  So, for instance, it's not about IS paying only 20%, but about them cutting this to 15%.

As far as I remember, the only complaint that is not about changing the rules is FT with the exchange rates. 

iStock is one place that trapped many contributors with their promises of bigger commissions for those who went exclusive with a deadline of August 31st just one month before their big announcement. That is why people want them to be accountable for what they have done. They would have known what was going on before the announcement. If their business was losing money by keeping the current commission rate earned by the different canister levels then why in the world would they want more to join just to take higher commissions? If that isn't misleading on their part I don't know what is. That's what it's all about. Many of the exclusives can't just pack up and leave because they have no portfolios anywhere else because of the broken promises.

Exactly what I would have written had I posted before you, Donna. Very well said, thank you.

I believe I was materially harmed by iStock. I believe I was knowingly misled. iStock managed to ruin years of goodwill in one, quick move. It isn't something I'm going to get over. My choices now are to leave exclusivity and start over from scratch at other agencies, or remain exclusive and accept a reduced commission in 2011. Neither choice is appealing, and both means I will lose money from what I "should" have been making. Had I been given the complete facts ahead of time, I would not have chosen exclusivity.

I'm not complaining as much as stating what they have done.

Incentives were promised to exclusives and have now been reneged on.
In essence these were contractual obligations.

A good litigator out to be able to prove that harm was done to this class.

iStock is one place that trapped many contributors with their promises of bigger commissions for those who went exclusive with a deadline of August 31st just one month before their big announcement.

It was even worse than that. The bombshell was dropped on September 8th.
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=251812&page=1

Without delving into long discussions about the history of cheating in business - which is very long; the milled edges to coins and weights & measures laws in many countries as but two examples - "it's just business" doesn't tell the whole story.

While there are many people who are honest regardless of laws or consequences, there are many more who will just do whatever they can get away with. This is why we have laws regulating business conduct in most of Western Europe and the US (I'm guessing in many other parts of the world as well, but I just don't know enough to speak of those). The notion is that business can flourish when customers can trust that purchase of a given weight of a described product is actually that weight and actually that product.

Protest by customers and suppliers when things aren't right is one of the ways major problems get fixed. Sometimes people vote with their feet and move elsewhere (the move from traditional stock to microstock being an example). To my way of thinking there's a lot that's right about the microstock sites even though there are problems. Before walking away, it's worth trying to push for some changes. 

On a separate topic, the notion that business and communities are totally separate is a relatively recent notion. For a long time businesses were closely tied to the communities in which they were located. Things in the last 30-50 years have changed a bit, particularly in the US, but suggesting that business and community must inevitably be separate seems to ignore a lot of possibilities.

So somewhere between "A cadet will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do" and "Greed is good" there has to be some sort of middle ground.

Quote from: donding on November 09, 2010, 10:42

iStock is one place that trapped many contributors with their promises of bigger commissions for those who went exclusive with a deadline of August 31st just one month before their big announcement.

It was even worse than that. The bombshell was dropped on September 8th.
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=251812&page=1

Whoops sorry I stand corrected..
I meant to say the month before meaning August...

The poster is right - ultimately voting with our feet and walking is our final recourse.

BUT

when some agency decides to change things to our serious detriment, first we are going to try to complain. When that doesn't work, we will possibly try to influence buyers.

Meanwhile expect the people getting shafted to spend a lot of time complaining to each other. That is what we are doing here.

Starting up a site isn't really a very viable option for most of us.

And when we see BS, we will call BS here where we won't get thrown out (hopefully).

If the site managers want to start up a site where they can complain about the submitters, they should do it. I'd love to read some of their posts.

I very carefully read stockmarketer's post and found it to be exactly on target. Absolutely accurate. I agree with every point he made.

+1 - the OP got a heart - a very revealing and wakening-up post.

I kept out of the iStock complaining threads since it serves no purpose and it takes time. Since iStock (and microstock in general in the limit) is "unsustainable" for me, I basically stopped uploading. Not as a "punishment" but since it makes no sense to buy props and spend hours in Photoshop working for 1$ per hour.

I agree with the OP that it is "capitalism" that steered the downfall of the (small) contributors, but in a less favorable way than he does. He probably meant "free market", but real capitalism is the worst enemy of a free market. Both are different.

In the Marxist framework, capitalism is the phenomenon whereby capital goods (production means like land, machines, capital)  or leverage becomes concentrated in the hands of a few, mainly by not giving a fair reward to the workers by alienating the fruits of their labor.
Free market is the phenomenon whereby the price for a good or service is only determined by the invisible hand that matches supply and demand. In the free market, value is not determined by the intrinsic value of a product or the work you've put in it, but by what someone else wants to pay for it. In stock, the saleability of an image is not determined by the time you put into a shot and the post-processing or the cost of the props and models, but how the buyers estimate it by buying it or not. As such, the free market can be more cruel than just capitalism but it's fair since it offers a flat transparent play-field to all players with no entrance hurdles like (a lot of) capital.

As to the big stock corporations, they didn't start as capitalists. They started with almost nothing (like Google) but they had an idea (calling it "vision" in hindsight) that by mere chance, took off. The first mice get the cheese but the pioneers also are the ones that get the arrows in their back. There are many more pioneers than mice. You can't really tell in advance or everybody would be rich. There is also no special merit in being rewarded by the market with a particular venture since it's all about guessing, failing and scoring - by chance. A monkey is still as successful in predicting Stock Exchange fluctuations as a financial guru. The "vision" thing is only applied later, like in Evolution. Many organisms try, a few are rewarded and control the species thereafter.

There are a few people with real vision, like Steve Jobs. He proved himself time after time by introducing new original products. Stock corporations didn't prove themselves at all. They don't make their products, they merely distribute them. Doing so, they destroyed the free market by becoming oligopolies, like every capitalist loves to do: full control of the market by omnipresence. They accumulated their wealth by alienating a part of the earning of image creators and let them and them alone take the burden of the free market, fighting and eating each other. Creator A loses, creator B wins. The agency doesn't care: it always wins.

The model that the OP proposes for the disgruntled ("start your own site, sell yourself") has face value but doesn't make sense since the free market is gone. Nobody can invest enough capital to fight the oligopolists any more. No RF site started after 2005 ever made it, even if they were better.

Yes it's capitalism, and the freedom it offers is illusory. It's the freedom to starve. What for instance, does freedom of speech means when you can't pay a medium to be heard? What's the freedom of press worth if you don't own a press? What does freedom of education mean for someone that can't pay college fees?
It's all as illusory as democray, where the outcome of the voting process is largely determined by the guy with the deepest pockets to buy advertisement space and time.

Who can blame them? "Start your own site"   Or vote with your feet: thousands of new feet are born every day. The oligopolists can only be beaten by their own game: a Google-like super-search engine that also offers price comparison. This might restore the free market again. Maybe.

I believe capitalism works well but needs some regulation/rules or union opposition.  Just look at the mess the banks got in to after years of deregulation.  There are several industries where the suppliers have been squeezed so hard they can barely survive while others are making huge profits from them.  I have never joined a union but if that's the only way to put the brakes on the sites moving further towards taking nearly all our earnings, then I'm interested.

We aren't really free to start our own site.  Who here has the money to do that?  A few of the big contributors could but they are either satisfied with their earnings or are moving on to macro.  In a perfect world, we could all go to a site that pays a decent commission and take all the buyers with us but that isn't going to happen.  I wish it would but too many people go along with whatever changes the sites make until its too late to do anything about it.

And some people think that uploading everything to 20 agencies to diversify and spread things out, is helping them, when what it's doing is diluting the sales, so no one has a dominant position and contributes to the price cutting and price war that's going on. As soon as a price is cut, the first person to lose is just as you have pointed out. The supplier gets squeezed.

That and your theory, which I don't entirely disagree with, assumes that there is a microstock "site that pays a decent commission". I don't see one?

As for the OP I've often said that no one is holding us hostage, no one is forcing us to sell images for peanuts. Anyone can walk away and do something else. After that, your post sounds more like someone who runs an agency than someone who supplies images to one. Actually it sounds like someone who runs a coal mine that doesn't have a union to protect workers, telling them how they are lucky to have jobs at all.

...No RF site started after 2005 ever made it, even if they were better...

I was starting to believe you on that one but Graphic Leftovers are perhaps the exception to that rule.  Veer have also had some success but they had Corbis behind them.

...And some people think that uploading everything to 20 agencies to diversify and spread things out, is helping them, when what it's doing is diluting the sales, so no one has a dominant position and contributes to the price cutting and price war that's going on. As soon as a price is cut, the first person to lose is just as you have pointed out. The supplier gets squeezed...

I disagree, there are lots of examples where there are 1 or 2 big companies that have cornered the market and they make it so difficult for their suppliers that they can only just survive.  Do you really think istock would pay us more money if they were the only site?  We would probably be on 1% commission by now.

Uh Oh!  I think this is whining about complainers whining about complainers complaining about whiners!

No it isn't. What's your point?

Quote from: louoates on November 09, 2010, 18:40

I very carefully read stockmarketer's post and found it to be exactly on target. Absolutely accurate. I agree with every point he made.

+1 - the OP got a heart - a very revealing and wakening-up post.

I kept out of the iStock complaining threads since it serves no purpose and it takes time. Since iStock (and microstock in general in the limit) is "unsustainable" for me, I basically stopped uploading. Not as a "punishment" but since it makes no sense to buy props and spend hours in Photoshop working for 1$ per hour.

I agree with the OP that it is "capitalism" that steered the downfall of the (small) contributors, but in a less favorable way than he does. He probably meant "free market", but real capitalism is the worst enemy of a free market. Both are different.

In the Marxist framework, capitalism is the phenomenon whereby capital goods (production means like land, machines, capital)  or leverage becomes concentrated in the hands of a few, mainly by not giving a fair reward to the workers by alienating the fruits of their labor.
Free market is the phenomenon whereby the price for a good or service is only determined by the invisible hand that matches supply and demand. In the free market, value is not determined by the intrinsic value of a product or the work you've put in it, but by what someone else wants to pay for it. In stock, the saleability of an image is not determined by the time you put into a shot and the post-processing or the cost of the props and models, but how the buyers estimate it by buying it or not. As such, the free market can be more cruel than just capitalism but it's fair since it offers a flat transparent play-field to all players with no entrance hurdles like (a lot of) capital.

As to the big stock corporations, they didn't start as capitalists. They started with almost nothing (like Google) but they had an idea (calling it "vision" in hindsight) that by mere chance, took off. The first mice get the cheese but the pioneers also are the ones that get the arrows in their back. There are many more pioneers than mice. You can't really tell in advance or everybody would be rich. There is also no special merit in being rewarded by the market with a particular venture since it's all about guessing, failing and scoring - by chance. A monkey is still as successful in predicting Stock Exchange fluctuations as a financial guru. The "vision" thing is only applied later, like in Evolution. Many organisms try, a few are rewarded and control the species thereafter.

There are a few people with real vision, like Steve Jobs. He proved himself time after time by introducing new original products. Stock corporations didn't prove themselves at all. They don't make their products, they merely distribute them. Doing so, they destroyed the free market by becoming oligopolies, like every capitalist loves to do: full control of the market by omnipresence. They accumulated their wealth by alienating a part of the earning of image creators and let them and them alone take the burden of the free market, fighting and eating each other. Creator A loses, creator B wins. The agency doesn't care: it always wins.

The model that the OP proposes for the disgruntled ("start your own site, sell yourself") has face value but doesn't make sense since the free market is gone. Nobody can invest enough capital to fight the oligopolists any more. No RF site started after 2005 ever made it, even if they were better.

Yes it's capitalism, and the freedom it offers is illusory. It's the freedom to starve. What for instance, does freedom of speech means when you can't pay a medium to be heard? What's the freedom of press worth if you don't own a press? What does freedom of education mean for someone that can't pay college fees?
It's all as illusory as democray, where the outcome of the voting process is largely determined by the guy with the deepest pockets to buy advertisement space and time.

Who can blame them? "Start your own site"   Or vote with your feet: thousands of new feet are born every day. The oligopolists can only be beaten by their own game: a Google-like super-search engine that also offers price comparison. This might restore the free market again. Maybe.

    This is a very thoughtful post, and well worth considering. Thanks for the effort to put it together!  To your last point, a couple of years ago at the PDN photo show, there was a seminar about selling stock in todays market ( or something like that ), and one point that one of the presenters made was that 40% of stock sales start as a google search. Google image search could very easily evolve with pricing comparison, given how much Google likes to get in other companies businesses and give it away for free. Although this might increase competition, it might also accelerate the race to the bottom for pricing of commodity images.

I kept out of the iStock complaining threads since it serves no purpose and it takes time. Since iStock (and microstock in general in the limit) is "unsustainable" for me, I basically stopped uploading. Not as a "punishment" but since it makes no sense to buy props and spend hours in Photoshop working for 1$ per hour.

Finally, someone with common sense admit it. I see so many photographers uploading pages of new contents with 0 to 5 downloads by pages. I don't see how they do. Borrowing props to friend, begging friends to model? I stopped uploading as well for the same reasons. This way I don't work and still get couple of $ an hour  

I wouldn't presume to tell anyone what to do or think, but I support the assertion that capitalism works.

By "capitalism" I mean a completely free market.  Nobody can "corner the marker" in a free market (without government intervention) because of competition.  Any company which abuses its suppliers and customers will lose them to another company that treats people with more fairness and respect.  The only antidote against inordinate corporate or individual greed is competition and freedom of choice.

Government intervention to make the markets "fair" is a losing proposition.  Because those in government have exactly the same tendency towards greed and self interest as anyone working in the private sector, the tremendous power of the government is prone to tremendous abuse.  That is why government regulation while allegedly aimed at improving the lives of the general public nearly always has the secret purpose of helping large, established corporations to shut down competition from smaller, nimbler and less greedy companies and individuals.

A classic example of harmful government intervention is the minimum wage.  Large companies like Walmart lobby the government hard to raise the rate and to impose other "standards" on corporations.  Instead of being intended to help the public, these have the (intended) effect of shutting down small, Mom and Pop businesses which have low wages and benefits, but which compete effectively with big companies because of their location, personal service and low cost structure.  Minimum wages actually hurt the people that the government claims it is trying to help, because it makes it more expensive for companies to hire young and inexperienced workers.  The law of supply and demand means that as the cost for labor goes up, the number of purchasers of labor goes down.  This is a win-win for large corporations and the government however.  Large corporations which pay rates above the minimum wage have their smaller, poorer competitors shut down.  Government gets a whole new class of unemployed and disaffected people which it can use as a welfare-dependent voting block, a rent-a-mob to be agitated whenever it suits the government's purposes, and as cannon fodder in foreign wars. 

All political parties use the government's power in the same way, so please don't construe any of what I am saying as some kind of denunciation or endorsement of any party, candidate or faction.  They are ALL greedy liars determined to seize and use the incredible power of the government for their own, selfish purposes.  Best to say as far away as possible from them and everything they do.

Quote from: jbarber873 on November 10, 2010, 10:25

I like the part about not working. Is it sustainable? 

Since uploading up to 600 new images in 6 months end in about 60$ (maybe 1000$ of production cost). It is, and I keep a good eyesight not being sticked to photoshop

  It's the secret to microstock! Lose 40 cents on every dollar, but make it up in volume....

There's something similar in the US, or you would all be working for Walmart or one of the other big companies.

Give it time. 

I kept out of the iStock complaining threads since it serves no purpose and it takes time. Since iStock (and microstock in general in the limit) is "unsustainable" for me, I basically stopped uploading. Not as a "punishment" but since it makes no sense to buy props and spend hours in Photoshop working for 1$ per hour.

How many hours would you need to work to even buy Photoshop? 

Quote from: jbarber873 on November 10, 2010, 10:05

To your last point, a couple of years ago at the PDN photo show, there was a seminar about selling stock in todays market ( or something like that ), and one point that one of the presenters made was that 40% of stock sales start as a google search. Google image search could very easily evolve with pricing comparison, given how much Google likes to get in other companies businesses and give it away for free. Although this might increase competition, it might also accelerate the race to the bottom for pricing of commodity images.

The large sites keep their mouths shut about this but I had private exchanges with some smaller sites managers (especially one) earlier on and they both told me more than 50% of their (sales) traffic came from Google. OK this might be biased since they sold little and they didn't do much marketing, but still. I'm currently more on image SEO forums, time permitting, than elsewhere. The new Google Images will be the key, I believe.

As to bottomline pricing, that's why it's a bit foolish to upload to sites that undercut the mainstream, like Thinkstock and Crestock. Sooner than later, buyers will find out and then you're burned. It's also reckless, even now, to upload the same shots on Alamy as on DT for a very different price point. People that do that shoot themselves in the feet, but it's a free market and a free world. Isn't that wonderful?

Transparency, freedom, low entry fee (an internet connection and a decent cam), both for the buyer and the seller. Oligopolistic capitalists beaten by their own weapons. Ah, just Imagine .

^^^ Thinkstock don't undercut the other subs sites, I checked their prices for buyers and they are similar to their rivals.  They just pay a lower commission.  That's why I wouldn't use them.  Buyers have been very aware for years that istock are charging more than other sites but they are still the No.1 site, so I don't think price is as big a factor in the commercial world as it is for consumer sites.  I used to avoid putting microstock images on alamy but they have done nothing to stop it happening and already have millions on their site.  As we can use different pseudonyms there, I don't see a problem and there is the argument that the alamy license is less restrictive than the microstock sites, so buyers have more choice.  I wish alamy would separate microstock images from their main collection but they haven't, so I presume they aren't having many complaints from their buyers.

I wouldn't presume to tell anyone what to do or think, but I support the assertion that capitalism works.

By "capitalism" I mean a completely free market.  Nobody can "corner the marker" in a free market (without government intervention) because of competition.  Any company which abuses its suppliers and customers will lose them to another company that treats people with more fairness and respect.  The only antidote against inordinate corporate or individual greed is competition and freedom of choice.

^^ have to agree that this crazy talk.
What happens when someone from another industry with much bigger margins comes into a market and simply buys out all the competition then does what they want (see greedy bankers buying IStock example).
That's why competition law and government intervention is absolutely necessary in any "free" market (and again you are confusing free markets and capitalism)

A classic example of harmful government intervention is the minimum wage.  Large companies like Walmart lobby the government hard to raise the rate and to impose other "standards" on corporations.  Instead of being intended to help the public, these have the (intended) effect of shutting down small, Mom and Pop businesses which have low wages and benefits, but which compete effectively with big companies because of their location, personal service and low cost structure.  Minimum wages actually hurt the people that the government claims it is trying to help, because it makes it more expensive for companies to hire young and inexperienced workers.  The law of supply and demand means that as the cost for labor goes up, the number of purchasers of labor goes down.  This is a win-win for large corporations and the government however.  Large corporations which pay rates above the minimum wage have their smaller, poorer competitors shut down.  Government gets a whole new class of unemployed and disaffected people which it can use as a welfare-dependent voting block, a rent-a-mob to be agitated whenever it suits the government's purposes, and as cannon fodder in foreign wars. 

Odd that other people are charging that Walmart underpays both workers and suppliers and skimps on worker benefits. In your example they are raising wages and benefits, to drive out the competition. Can it be both ways?

Also this free market wage for workers, with no minimum wage, must explain why migrant workers and illegals get paid so well in the US?

A federal minimum wage was first set in 1938. WalMart first opened in 1962. I suppose you can explain the other 24 years as some sort of Government plot, before Walmart started controlling the economy?

I will agree with you on the welfare dependent voting block, created by "free money" and handouts. Just not the way it came about.

The original premise here is that a "good" agency, paying a "fair" wage, would beat all the rest. It's a free market, why haven't we seen one? Because idealistic business operations ignore the fact that they need to make money and aren't operating a business for OUR benefit, but for their own profits. A business does not operate for sake of the workers, it works for the oners and investors, so they can make a profit from their investments.

Quote from: jbarber873 on November 11, 2010, 08:26

I'm getting lost again. Am I the oligopolistic capitalist, or is that someone else? Because I wouldn't mind being the oligopolistic capitalist for a while. It sounds like fun. Can I buy some $6000 shower curtains? Just imagine

Only if you are the only curtain producer in the world.

What a glorious non-sequitur!