11.5.07

Vertizontal Consolidation

In the small town where I grew up, there exist three seemingly unrelated businesses. Until recently I thought the names were just a coincidence, but now I realize that this series of companies is remarkable in many ways. The companies are:

  1. Bang’s ambulance service
  2. Bang’s funeral home
  3. Bang’s sausage manufacturing plant
I think this is the first example of what I like to call the "vertizontal merger". Bang is capitalizing on both sick and hurt people, as well as the families of the sick, and of course on the dead. But Bang is also making sausage, which is where the synergies really come to life. Bang is being paid to cart dead people away, and then again to turn them into sausage. This merger has drastically cut costs for the sausage division. But what is so unique about this merger is that the company has simultaneously capitalized on the cresting wave of the American consumer's willingness to eat just about anything, so long as it is cheap AND delicious, in this case human sausage.

Recommendation: We have already documented the surging "willing-to-consume-feces" demo," but now that demo has one-upped itself as if to say "excrement is nothing -- we’ll pay to eat our own relatives (provided that our relatives are both cheap and delicious." And Bang’s ambulance/funeral/sausage is there to reap the profits. Right now, I really like any business plan that is based on ruthlessly taking advantage of the American public's willingess to eat anything which is both cheap and delicious.