Conglomeration Paper

I chose to do this paper over conglomeration. The article that I decided to use is Americans like Choices Not a Conglomeration of Look-A-Likes by Ted A. Schweitzer. This article is about how some businesses began offering fewer and fewer choices, “which Americans seem to love”, after they were bought by a larger corporation (Schweitzer, 2008). I really liked this article and thought it had some really good examples over the topic of conglomeration. Schweitzer talks about how retail business like The Gap, Old Navy, and Schwinn (a bicycle shop) were victims of conglomeration. These stores became “homogenized” when they were bought by larger corporations that were not listed in the article (Schweitzer, 2008). It would have been nice to know what
Bicycle shops began selling more European and Japanese bikes rather than Schwann brand bikes. I think Schweitzer did a great job using these examples to show how conglomeration can be hurtful to consumers by getting rid of their choices. Schweitzer’s best example he gave was the one about farming. In this example he showed how planting the same kind of crop yearly in the same soil can actually began to cause many problems (Schweitzer, 2008). Their yields and their bank accounts all benefited from rotating different crops each year (Schweitzer, 2008). Schweitzer did a great job using this example to show how having more choices is more beneficial than having less and less choices. I believe Schweitzer did an amazing job using his examples while talking about conglomeration. The only thing I would have liked to see different about this article would be a little more background research on which corporation bought out those other
Americans like Choices Not a Conglomeration of Look-A-Likes by Ted A. Schweitzer would help to explain a little more of what conglomeration. The examples in this article would be very helpful within chapter thirteen. I think my favorite part of the article was when Schweitzer talked about the Schwinn bicycles, because I have never even heard of Schwinn bikes until after I read this article. I thought it was interesting to see how corporations do by out other companies, and then sell their products from that store, which they are probably selling in all the other stores of the other companies they bought out. This will then trim down the amount of choices you have with different products, which I like to have. I completely agree with the point that Schweitzer made about how Americans love choices. I think that having multiple choices is an amazing thing to have. This article could also fit in with the section of this chapter that talks about companies merging. When Schweitzer talks about the Swine bicycles he seems to hint that they merged with other bicycle companies. What the European and Japanese bikes started to become popular the Swine bikes started to become less and less popular than the new style bicycles (Schweitzer, 2008). Based from Schweitzer saying “ What happened to the Schwinn-only stores?” It seems like Schwinn merged with these other