Competition is Good - But I Won`t Open a Jewelry Store in the Libyan Desert
I like competition. In fact, I like it so much I created my own competition back in the early 1980s on Canal Street in New York City. When I decided to expand my gold-buying business into New York (I was already buying gold at hotels in New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Delaware) there were already five gold-buying stores on Canal Street between Lafayette Street and the Bowery.
After I started my first store at 203 Canal Street in 1980, I opened up 4 more at 235, 199, 179, and 149 Canal Streets all within a block of each other. In this manner, operating 5 out of the 10 stores buying gold, I ended up with more than half of that business in downtown New York.
Years later, when I was in the International Phone-Call-Center business (1) I did the same thing in Chinatown by opening up a number of self-competing stores on Mott Street, Lafayette Street, and a few on East Broadway, all within a block or two of each other.
When I entered the prepaid phonecard business in the early 1990s there were less than a few dozen brands of cards in existence in the states. After more than a dozen-and-a-half years later our company by itself was marketing more than 900 different brands of cards sold in tens of thousands of bodegas throughout the country and the world. In Greece alone there were more than a hundred different brands of cards. In Chinatown in New York when a customer was choosing to buy a card from 30 different Chinese brands on display, more than half of them belonged to my company.
But as much as I like competition I will not be opening up a jewelry store anywhere near this guy in order to compete with him:
A natural, solitary Tuareg jewellery shop in the Sahara desert, Acacus, Libya.
Photo Credit: Temehu Tourism Services
ENDNOTES
(1):
An International Phone-Call-Center is a store with a number of phone booths where mostly immigrants come in to make international phone calls. Before the advent of prepaid phonecards, these stores were the only economical way to make overseas calls. In 1992 a call to China from a home phone could easily cost $2.50 or more per minute. Call centers typically charged less than half that amount.
