Cadbury has just been bought by Kraft for $18.9 billion dollars. Today's press carries thousands of words on the matter. None of which are about chocolate.
I realize I'm being stupid now. Giant food corporations aren't about making good-tasting and nutritious food, they're about economies of scale, worldwide distributions, maximizing resources, shelf-space and other sundry optimizations and utilizations and brain-dead-izations.
Consolidations are seldom if not never about delivering a better product to consumers at a lower cost. They're about a few people at the top and a few M&A machinators pocketing millions upon millions for their few months of work.
Chocolate, of course, isn't much different from advertising agencies. (They both stain your clothes.) All the big consolidations and mergers that we've lived through--I won't say survived--haven't delivered more, better work. They haven't streamlined processes. Or cut costs to clients.
They've made a few people very rich. I can't for the life of me think of any other benefit.
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