[the_mar]

Many years ago I worked at a candy company. I tell you more. MOST of "private label" stuff is actually manufactured by the same company as the "name brand", what is more companies routinely manufacture stuff for each other depending on the factory loads, e.g. our plant would manufacture Reese's despite having no relation to the brand and it's a very common practice.

[eulgro]

I worked for a cookie company. Sometimes we would just swap the boxes for the name brand in the packaging machine while the line was running. The funny thing is, one box said it had some ingredient in it (it didn't) and the other one didn't.

Also at some point one company asked the cookie company to create a recipe to imitate some other product so they could compete. Except the cookie company was the one making that other product. So they copied themselves, it wasn't too hard...

[fuzzfactor]

>we would just swap the boxes for the name brand in the packaging machine while the line was running.

Any difference in consumer price of the identical product would be largely due to advertising.

[the_mar]

Wait until you hear about designer handbags.

[fuzzfactor]

From what I hear, the top designers there don't actually need advertising.

[the_mar]

Oh like you’re saying top designers do not spend millions on marketing, my sweet summer child.

It’s not that brands spend money on ads so they have to raise the prices. It’s that advertising enables brands to charge more because they can

[kbenson]

That sounds like an industry where a few large players have gobbled up everyone else and entrenched themselves, and they're all relatively happy with their market share (i.e. they aren't competing), and are thus happy to help "competitors" because what they want more than anything else is stability, and to keep new entrants from the market that actually might change things.

You know, collusion. Or emergent behavior that's essentially the same (but even that, while not necessarily illegal, is still bad for consumers).

[the_mar]

it's not really all that sinister. It's just you have a factory and you have workers and sometimes you need more work for them than your company can provide. Just because you can manufacture items for your competitor does not mean you are colluding. I'll tell you more, a lot of competitors use the same suppliers, like for example Ford and GM, will use LG for a lot of components. LG then can't share any tech they developed for GM when working with Ford, but it's not like they get a lobotomy.

People who work at Apple use AWS and people at Amazon use MacBooks. It's all complicated, but not sinister.

[bombcar]

Similar things happen in the tech world - lots of various products are manufactured by a few; TVs being a really good example. There are only a few panel manufacturers out there.