‘If Starbucks opens a café just round the corner from another Starbucks, is that really about selling more coffee?’
“New Starbucks Opens in Restroom of Existing Starbucks”, announced The Onion, satirically, in 1998. It was a glimpse of the future: there were fewer than 2,000 Starbucks outlets back then and there are more than 21,000 now. They are also highly concentrated in some places. Seoul has nearly 300 Starbucks cafés, London has about 200 — a quarter of all the Starbucks outlets in the UK — and midtown Manhattan alone has 100. It raises the question: how many Starbucks shopfronts are too many?
Such concerns predate the latte boom. In the late 1970s, Douglas Adams (also satirically) posited the Shoe Event Horizon. This is the point at which so much of the retail landscape is given over to shoe shops that utter economic collapse is inevitable.
And in 1972, the US Federal Trade Commission issued an entirely non-satirical complaint against the leading manufacturers of breakfast cereal, alleging that they were behaving anti-competitively by packing the shelves with frivolous variations on the basic cereals. That case dragged on for years before eventually being closed down by congressional action.
The intuition behind these complaints is straightforward. If Starbucks opens a café just round the corner — or in some cases, across the road — from another Starbucks, could that really be about selling more coffee, or is it about creating a retail landscape so caffeinated that no rival could survive? Similarly, the arrival on the supermarket shelves of Cinnamon Burst Cheerios might seem reasonable enough, were they not already laden with Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and Cheerios Protein Cinnamon Almond and 12 other variants on the Cheerios brand.
Conceptually, there is little difference between having outlets that are physically close together and having products that differ only in subtle ways. But it is hard to be sure exactly why a company is packing its offering so densely, at the risk of cannibalising its own sales.
A crush of products or outlets may be because apparently similar offerings reflect differences that matter to consumers. I do not much care whether I am eating Corn Flakes or Shreddies — the overall effect seems much the same to me — but others may care very much indeed. It might well be that in midtown Manhattan, few people will bother walking an extra block to get coffee, so if Starbucks wants customers it needs to be on every corner.
But an alternative explanation is that large companies deliberately open too many stores, or launch too many products, because they wish to pre-empt competitors. Firms could always slash prices instead to keep the competition away but that may not be quite as effective — a competitor might reasonably expect any price war to be temporary. It is less easy to un-launch a new product or shut down a brand-new outlet. A saturated market is likely to stay saturated for a while, then, and that should make proliferation a more credible and effective deterrent than low prices.
A recent paper by two economists from Yale, Mitsuru Igami and Nathan Yang, studies this question in the market for fast-food burgers. Igami and Yang used old telephone directories to track the expansion of the big burger chains into local markets across Canada from 1970 to 2005. After performing some fancy analysis, they concluded that big burger chains did seem to be trying to pre-empt competition. If Igami and Yang’s model is to be believed, McDonald’s was opening more outlets, more quickly than would otherwise have been profitable.
It is the consumer who must ultimately pay for these densely packed outlets and products. But perhaps the price is worthwhile. The econometrician Jerry Hausman once attempted to measure the value to consumers of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. He concluded that it was tens of millions of dollars a year — not much in the context of an economy of $17tn a year, but not nothing either. Perhaps competitors were shut out of the market by Apple Cinnamon Cheerios but that doesn’t mean that consumers didn’t value them.
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It may be helpful to consider what life would be like if every café, cereal brand or fast-food joint were owned by a separate company. Steven Salop, an economist at Georgetown University, produced an elegant economic analysis of this scenario in 1979. He found that even a market full of independents will seem a little too crowded. This is because firms will keep showing up and looking for customers until there is not enough demand to cover their costs. The last entrepreneur to enter is the one that just breaks even, scraping together enough customers to pay for the cost of setting up the business. She is indifferent to whether she is in business or doing something else entirely. However, every other entrepreneur in the crowded market is wishing that she had stayed away.
Whether the products are shoes or cereal, lattes or cheeseburgers, markets will often seem wastefully crowded. That perception is largely an illusion, but not entirely. In big city markets, there really are too many cereals, too many cafés and too many fast-food restaurants. But even if they were all mom-and-pop independents, that might still be true.
Written for and first published at ft.com.