The article quotes “a senior vice president” at one of the US’s two largest paperclip makers as saying “We actually can’t understand how the U.S. consumption can be so huge”. I do hope he’s lying or misinformed by his colleagues, because otherwise what we have is a company with a tens-of-millions-of-dollars business that doesn’t understand what its customers do with its products and apparently hasn’t taken the elementary steps that might enable it to find the answer. (E.g., find 100 people, pay them a bit of money and ask them “What have you done with paperclips in the last week?” and “How many paperclips did you buy last week”; repeat a few times.)
It doesn’t seem impossible that he might be lying. For instance, suppose it turns out that most paperclips are never used—they get bought in large quantities and lost, or they’re only easily available in quantities much larger than most people need, or something. Then a paperclip vendor might well not want to let customers know, lest they buy less.
There were some people who drilled very straight tunnels and laid fibreoptic cables through them. They knew people were willing to pay a lot for this, but didn’t realize it was High-Frequency-Traders wanting a faster connection between Chicago and NYSE.
Some producers of intermediate goods see demand fluctuate from month to month, but have little idea why, or whether the fluctuations will persist.
I do hope he’s lying or misinformed by his colleagues, because otherwise what we have is a company with a tens-of-millions-of-dollars business that doesn’t understand what its customers do with its products and apparently hasn’t taken the elementary steps that might enable it to find the answer.
How likely is it that acquiring this information will be cost effective? Why do you think that?
The mental back-of-envelope calculation went something like this:
11B paperclips per year sold in the US, most made in the US; Officemate are one of the two dominant US paperclip vendors; let’s say 3B/year. They sell for “about a penny” each, so let’s say $30M in revenue; I don’t know what margins are like in the paperclip business, but let’s say $3M/year in gross profit. Usage and sales of paperclips probably aren’t all that unstable from year to year; let’s use a horizon of 5 years and say that there’s $15M of profit at stake here. A 1% improvement in sales or profit margin is therefore worth about $150k, and anything that offers such an improvement at less than that cost is worth while.
Now, how do you find out what’s happening to all those paperclips? Well, I’d have thought you try to identify the really big users (which you might do by talking to your largest customers) and to get a handle on what typical users do (which you might do by surveying random people).
I don’t have a very good sense of how expensive this sort of survey is, so here’s some further back-of-envelope stuff. Suppose that to find 100 people who have used paperclips in the last week and are willing to talk to you for a few minutes you have to trawl through 1000 people and take about 2 minutes for each; and suppose that your 100 qualified people take you 10 minutes each. Then that’s 3000 minutes, or about 50 hours, for 100 paperclip-users. Perhaps you need to pay $20/hour to the people operating the survey (for the people themselves, or the use of whatever facilities they need, or whatever), making $1000 for those 100 paperclip-users. And perhaps you need to give them some incentive—say $10 each—to participate in your survey. That’s $2000 for 100 paperclip users. So for $50k you can survey 2500 people. (Only $50k because I’m assuming that some of the $150k goes to investigating the biggest users, that some of it goes to pay the clever-and-expensive people who help you make sense of the results, and that some of it is left as margin to reduce the probability that you end up making a loss on the exercise if the information you get really isn’t much use in optimizing the design, marketing, etc., of your paperclips.)
2500 people seems like a lot more than you’d really need to get a decent picture of how your products are being used. (Of course you wouldn’t, in any case, survey that many people. You’d start with a smaller number and use what you find to guide your next round of investigation.)
For the avoidance of doubt, my actual mental back-of-envelope calculation was less detailed.
so let’s say $30M in revenue; I don’t know what margins are like in the paperclip business, but let’s say $3M/year in gross profit.
I don’t think 10% margins for commodity producers are really realistic, it’s probably much lower margins, and they’re probably doing many things other than paperclips so they have no particular reason to focus on that.
Most companies have only vague idea what consumers do with their products.
The article quotes “a senior vice president” at one of the US’s two largest paperclip makers as saying “We actually can’t understand how the U.S. consumption can be so huge”. I do hope he’s lying or misinformed by his colleagues, because otherwise what we have is a company with a tens-of-millions-of-dollars business that doesn’t understand what its customers do with its products and apparently hasn’t taken the elementary steps that might enable it to find the answer. (E.g., find 100 people, pay them a bit of money and ask them “What have you done with paperclips in the last week?” and “How many paperclips did you buy last week”; repeat a few times.)
It doesn’t seem impossible that he might be lying. For instance, suppose it turns out that most paperclips are never used—they get bought in large quantities and lost, or they’re only easily available in quantities much larger than most people need, or something. Then a paperclip vendor might well not want to let customers know, lest they buy less.
There are cases like this!
There were some people who drilled very straight tunnels and laid fibreoptic cables through them. They knew people were willing to pay a lot for this, but didn’t realize it was High-Frequency-Traders wanting a faster connection between Chicago and NYSE.
Some producers of intermediate goods see demand fluctuate from month to month, but have little idea why, or whether the fluctuations will persist.
How likely is it that acquiring this information will be cost effective? Why do you think that?
The mental back-of-envelope calculation went something like this:
11B paperclips per year sold in the US, most made in the US; Officemate are one of the two dominant US paperclip vendors; let’s say 3B/year. They sell for “about a penny” each, so let’s say $30M in revenue; I don’t know what margins are like in the paperclip business, but let’s say $3M/year in gross profit. Usage and sales of paperclips probably aren’t all that unstable from year to year; let’s use a horizon of 5 years and say that there’s $15M of profit at stake here. A 1% improvement in sales or profit margin is therefore worth about $150k, and anything that offers such an improvement at less than that cost is worth while.
Now, how do you find out what’s happening to all those paperclips? Well, I’d have thought you try to identify the really big users (which you might do by talking to your largest customers) and to get a handle on what typical users do (which you might do by surveying random people).
I don’t have a very good sense of how expensive this sort of survey is, so here’s some further back-of-envelope stuff. Suppose that to find 100 people who have used paperclips in the last week and are willing to talk to you for a few minutes you have to trawl through 1000 people and take about 2 minutes for each; and suppose that your 100 qualified people take you 10 minutes each. Then that’s 3000 minutes, or about 50 hours, for 100 paperclip-users. Perhaps you need to pay $20/hour to the people operating the survey (for the people themselves, or the use of whatever facilities they need, or whatever), making $1000 for those 100 paperclip-users. And perhaps you need to give them some incentive—say $10 each—to participate in your survey. That’s $2000 for 100 paperclip users. So for $50k you can survey 2500 people. (Only $50k because I’m assuming that some of the $150k goes to investigating the biggest users, that some of it goes to pay the clever-and-expensive people who help you make sense of the results, and that some of it is left as margin to reduce the probability that you end up making a loss on the exercise if the information you get really isn’t much use in optimizing the design, marketing, etc., of your paperclips.)
2500 people seems like a lot more than you’d really need to get a decent picture of how your products are being used. (Of course you wouldn’t, in any case, survey that many people. You’d start with a smaller number and use what you find to guide your next round of investigation.)
For the avoidance of doubt, my actual mental back-of-envelope calculation was less detailed.
I don’t think 10% margins for commodity producers are really realistic, it’s probably much lower margins, and they’re probably doing many things other than paperclips so they have no particular reason to focus on that.
Most companies have only vague idea what consumers do with their products.
Perhaps there is a Clippy after all.....
Anyone whoever doubted that is an idiot.
Nevermind, didn’t read the whole thread.