Carlos has a souvenir stall at the resort. He almost never gets any customers even though you can hardly find a single tourist who isn’t interested in buying a Dominican souvenir.
The reason for Carlos’s lack of sales is the way he conducts business. Whenever a potential customer appears and starts to ask for the price of an item, Carlos refuses to name it. Instead, he places all of the items the customer seems to notice on a plate. When the plate begins to spill over with items, Carlos names an absolutely exorbitant price for them. If the customer is anything like me, she feels insulted and leaves. In most other cases, the customer imagines the length of time it would take to haggle the price down to something reasonable, feels bored, and leaves.
If Carlos put reasonable price tags on his souvenirs, he’d sell out his stock within hours. However, the painstaking hunt for a tiny margin of profit does not attract him. He prefers to spend his time hoping for a miracle. One day, he dreams, a tourist who’d be too drunk or too rich to care would stumble upon Carlos’s stall and buy an item for 20 times its worth.
I recognize this mentality only too well from my own culture. People spend years chasing after some ridiculous plans of rapid self -enrichment that never come to anything. In the meanwhile, they live in poverty. Try offering them a reasonable opportunity to make a small profit (and then a slightly bigger one and so on), and you will see the light go out of their eyes and boredom take place of enthusiasm.
“Why do you work so much for so little money? ” is the question my Ukrainian relatives and acquaintances ask me all the time.
Clarissa's Blog 
I always thought the same thing about my fellow college students who were really into the idea of making millions the way Warren Buffet did – essentially, they had hopes of making billions through day trading. In reality, they are more likely to become a Fortune 500 CEO than a Warren Buffet – or at least earn a huge salary in pursuit of becoming a Fortune 500 CEO, but they just kept thinking they would be the lucky one to follow in Buffet’s footsteps…
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It’s true that many business students have this mentality initially. I think the sooner they get over it, the greater are their chances of being successful.
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There have been studies which suggest that an important cause of the failure of MBAs to increase productivity of the companies they join is that the typical MBA student is a “shortcutter” trying to make it to the big time without putting the many hours required to master a field. In particular McGill’s MBA program has stopped taking (for the most part) fresh of university MBA applicants and only allows experienced business people to apply.
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How do you know that Carlos does not make a living? Such a tactic might work in a tourist trap on other people.
I would also point out the essentially anti-capitalist mentality of the “Carlos view.” It assumes you can game the system and take from other people.
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How is taking from other people anti-capitalist? Or gaming the system? I mean, in practice. Weren’t banks selling bad mortages “gaming the system”? Or health insurance industry’s standard practice of getting great lawyers not to pay, even when people deserve it lawfully?
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Those banks were as anti -capitalist as humanly possible given that they took governmental money to stay afloat.
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Government funded banks are not capitalism. To be capitalism there must not be any coercion or attempts to trick anyone. It must be rational individuals who freely consent to exchange goods and services.
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I agree with Izgad. These bank bailouts were deeply Soviet. In capitalism you assume the consequences of your risks. That’s kind of the whole point : my gains are mine but so are my losses.
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Those banks were as anti -capitalist as humanly possible given that they took governmental money to stay afloat.(Clarissa)
They may be anti-capitalist but when it comes to playing the game they are brilliant. 😉
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What about health insurance industry? Not only in US, but in general. In Israel to take additional insurance is fully voluntary, yet attempts to “trick” (not pay claims) are a usual thing.
//To be capitalism there must not be any … attempts to trick anyone.
Who said that? Real life capitalism doesn’t seem to behave this way. 🙂
It’s like saying “To be real communism there must not be … “. Only it is.
F.e. not having perfect information is the rule, rather than exception, and firms usually want to advertise, not to tell of disadvantages.
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We do not have real capitalism or anything close to. The big irony is that the things that we most closely associate with capitalism such as Wall Street and health care are some of the least capitalist features of our system. I hope that one day we will have capitalism, but for now it must remain an unrealized ideal.
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“…but for now it must remain an unrealized ideal.”
Or, as a cynic might call it, ‘No True Scotsman.’
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There can be many “true capitalists” even if we do not have a capitalist society. All you have to do is be willing to not initiate force (and that includes government) against anyone else. For example I am someone who has benefited from public universities and libraries and has an interest in their continued existence. I am willing, though, to not make anyone pay for these things who does not want to through taxes even if this leads to these things having to go private, which will certainly hurt me. The ideal of liberty means that much to me.
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Would you like a medal?
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Just for other people to leave me alone and not use force (including government) against me.
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He has a day job, too. This is just a small business on the side.
I’m so interested in this because I also worked at such a stall and it’s the only kind of sales I could totally enjoy. And I know I’d be better at it than Carlos.
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I know several graduate students with the same attitude. They will only work on the “big projects” and the “big ideas”. Once the slightest obstacle presents itself, they will move on to the next big project, because this one is too risky. Needless to say, they don’t end up with either the “big paper”, or the solid but smaller papers.
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This is so true. On every street corner there are guys hanging out waiting for someone to give them a large sum of money.
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On every street corner there are guys hanging out waiting for someone to give them a large sum of money.(Hattie)
Geez, I usually thought it was women waiting on the street corner for men to give them large sums of money. 😉
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C’mon. Did you ever notice the uproar over the Midwest regional multistate lottery (Powerball)? This is no third-world phenomenon, it is human nature.
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People who buy the lottery still go to work, I presume? My Ukrainian friends fainted with hunger in the streets, yet rejected perfectly good work opportunities. Please don’t tell me living in the Midwest has helped you understand my people.
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Third World? Or Second World?
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There are lots of things to say about this, most (from me) fairly predictable and already suggested here, i.e. his eyes are bigger than his stomach and he has been beguiled by the idea and perhaps fact that many people at the resort could actually afford to buy the whole stall if they wanted to … and one can consider the hyper marketing mentality in places like Cuzco, where people, partly under the influence of certain ex (super neo liberal) Presidents of Pewru, will say straight out: you could afford to come here, so why should I not gouge you for everything I can?
But the more interesting image that comes to my mind is, what is Carlos’ prior sales experience? Because he is acting exactly like a seller in a vegetable market. Clients know which vegetables they want and point them out, and the seller puts them in a tray, then weighs everything at the end and tells the client (who already knew it would be within reach for them, it is a set of vegetables) what the price is.
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When I went to the markets in Zimbabwe, there was a guy there selling oil paintings for $7 dollars each. I said, “That’s too little, let me pay $9 each for them.”
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