Compatriots in Competition
As I’m sitting here writing this, I’m in a record/cocktail lounge sipping on a negroni. One of the owners, who makes the best cocktails west of the Mississippi River and is dressed like the guys from Wayne’s World, were sponsored by Buc-ee’s, and I were chatting about the comings and goings of the food scene in town. In town we have this wonderful thing called the Beer-muda Triangle: three craft breweries that offer live music and a welcome respite from Busch Light and Stag. The owners and brewmasters of these breweries are here with us in our conversation. The topic of the day: how to best support the town’s monthly First Friday, sort of a pub-crawl-meets-art-exhibit.
These guys working together is nothing new; they’ll collaborate with other businesses and each other to introduce novel ideas. For example, two of these breweries don’t have food service licenses. To save on the cost, they’ll stock some restaurants’ menus and you can order directly through them, add it to your tab, and get the food delivered from a few doors down. Talk about a win-win-win! The brewery doesn’t need to foot the expense and liability of a kitchen, and they get to keep your butt in a seat. I don’t have to leave to get food and only have one bill to deal with. The restaurant doesn’t need to foot the expense and liability of a liquor license and they get to keep selling their food to people who aren’t even on property! These kinds of collabs are great ways to compete and still complement each other.
Competition is often viewed as cutthroat. Firms can use the political process to protect themselves from competition or target their competitors. For example, The Wright Amendment of 1979. Repealed in 2014, the Wright Amendment was a federal law that governed traffic at Dallas’s Love Field. Enacted after Southwest Airlines’s refusal to vacate Love for Dallas-Fort Worth airfield, it prohibited any airline from operating transport-category aircraft with more than 56 seats to anywhere beyond Texas and the surrounding states. (American Airlines, a major competitor to Southwest and also based in the DFW area was grandfathered in, of course.)
As I sit sipping on my cocktail I’m mulling these ideas around in my head. Who said competition needs to be cutthroat and adversarial? At the end of the day, everyone around me is competing for my hard-earned entertainment dollar. Yet, here they are, fully aware of their competition and seeking to create their own niche. It seems counter-intuitive that they would be here, effectively undermining their competitive edge; however, these guys understand the environment they operate in. They can’t compete with the macro-breweries and chain restaurants on price, but they can on variety. This additional variety creates more wealth; not just for the Beer-muda Triangle, but for all of us as well. We have a wealth of choices and novel experiences available to us to spend our entertainment money. Working together, but with their own self-interest at heart, these guys compete, collaborate, and create. In a world where open and honest competition is in short supply, it is encouraging to see that at least in our own microcosm the utter cynicism of the world around us has yet to take hold.
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