Shifting Costs as a Business Strategy

There were a flurry of news  stories talking about how Wal-Mart shifts costs from its business to government, and other businesses, as a strategy of lowering its costs so that the stockholders can make more money.

For benefits, the basic idea is that instead of paying benefits to employees, you shift their health costs to the city / state / federal by hiring as many part time workers (less than 32 hours a week, thus since they are not "full time" they are not required to offer these work "benefits" to them so the Government picks up the cost of providing it) yet they get the full work as if these people worked full time. You just hire two to four part-time people to cover the house and thus you save the 25% cost of "benefit" package that would go to a single full time person.

Sometimes these shifting of costs occurs under the guise of customer ease and at first it seems to be true. Many firms now offer support contracts for software.  However, instead of them sending you the updates, you now have to go to them - spending your time - to check to see if there are any (Microsoft tries to limit that by requiring users to go to a universal update site - but you are REQUIED to be part of this service so it tracks you and sort of helps at same time).

Now one thing that changed was that on big MSDN subs you no longer get any physical CD / DVDs - you get to download the image. This DOES cut down the time before you get an update - but now if you want (and you always need to have it) a physical image on CD / DVD you now have to download, have a burner, buy the media, burn the media, write down what is on the media and then create your own storage system - they just shifted a LOT of costs onto you while saving them shipping costs, and media production costs - in the guise of making it easier and faster for a person to get the software.

Add in now that you MUST have a high speed line to download a 4 GIG ISO image (and a few hours when you are not going to use the line) they shifted more costs onto you too.

I expect many more businesses will use these methods to shift costs from them to end users and all versions of government in order to make more money for the few people who own the their business (most of these are often owned by less than 10 big firms, and all the people who own 1 to a few thousand shares are effectively ignored in how they run the business anyway.)

Note: This is different than openly shifting costs to people. If someone wants their product in three days instead of six and they pay extra that is not the same situation.