No conspiracy theories are needed. Boards are incestious, most board members aren’t all that bright or forward looking, they have a lot of imposter syndrome about it, they worry about getting important trends wrong, and so they follow the herd. CEOs follow the board, companies follow the CEO, voila, everybody does the same thing at the same time.
And yes, I think there is an opportunity to zig while everyone else is zagging.
Also: major institutional investors (such as VCs) demand a seat on the board and then send their B team to actually sit through the board meetings of their less key investments. Those board members follow the investor company’s line, spreading it to lots of companies at once.
We then informed corporate of the numbers, and someone would quickly is how to price the gas that day.
I thought it was about keeping the price competitive. No, I was told, it’s the exact opposite.
We would gladly sell the gas at cost, if not less, because the real money came from coffee and other merch.
But the state had a minimum mark up law. We had to charge the customers more.
The idea was to protect small gas stations from corporate chains, but gas is a commodity. Everyone pays about the same.
I later found out that the reason I was reason I was recording the competitors prices was to make sure they were following the minimum markup laws, so we could sue them if they werent.
They made money by selling coffee, which costs less than a cent, for five bucks.
True. That's no reason to "leave money on the table" as they may have seen it, and being substantially cheaper than the alternative, when they could have been barely cheaper and attracting the same amount of people.