Swiss Cheese Cartel

A short video on product cartels

Swiss Cheese Cartel Transcript:

Everyone likes things, but things cost money, thankfully under normal trade money can be exchanged for goods and services, but what happens when one person or group controls all of the supply of a certain thing? That’s when you get a cartel, no not that type of cartel but similar, in economics a cartel is an organisation between a group of producers to limit supply and artificially drive prices up. These so called product cartels are actually a lot more common than you think because its surprisingly easy to just make some backdoor deals with other industry giants to make a lot of money. And that’s what todays video is going to be all about, we are going to be looking at some of these shady organisations and dealings that led to product cartels like the Swiss cheese cartel. The swiss cheese cartel formally known as the swiss cheese union basically ruled the whole of the swiss cheese industry for about 100 years, yes that’s right this alphorn blowing little child used to control an industry that at one point used to cost the swiss government more than its entire military. But lets start at the beginning, its 1914, WW1 is going to break out and Europe is going to be completely destroyed, but thankfully due to switzerlands neutral position (make cheese not war) the price of cheese was pretty stable even though exports did slightly decrease. And Even though things could have been a lot worse, they could have also been a lot better thought the swiss cheese manufacturers who decided to create the swiss cheese union in 1914 to collude with other manufacturers and create strict non-compete laws, they also told dairy farmers exactly how much milk to produce and who to sell it to and told cheesemakers exactly how much cheese to make aswell as how much to sell it for. The Union basically controlled the entire cheese industry from cow to milk to cheese to store. Now, originally there were around 1000 plus different kinds of cheeses that used to be produced, which if you are trying to control an entire industry is a lot of paperwork and because there was no Microsoft excel this would lead to a lot of delays and mistakes which is, not gouda for business hehe. So they reduced the amount of cheeses produced to only just a few, mostly just gruyere and Emmental (emontal) which obviously meant that instead of a small amount of a lot of varied cheeses you had mountains of just a few cheeses, which presented its own problems. Namely getting rid of all of this cheese. But thankfully the Swiss cheese union had a solution for that too, fraud. I feel like fraud sometimes gets a bad rep, its always been there for me when I needed it the most and… I mean we completely disavow fraudulent activities on the stoic stick channel and comply with all necessary laws and guidelines. (sigh) okay anyway cheese fraud. The union had to basically hold up the entire dairy market by buying dairy with money that they got from government subsidies. These purchases artificially kept up the prices of milk and cheese which meant that dairy farmers and cheesemakers had guaranteed income, securing income of their primary producers, which is actually a pretty smart thing to do. This did however mean that, sweet mother of pearl that’s a lot of cheese. That there was a little bit of a backlog of cheese. The swiss cheese union needed to get rid of all this cheese and the only way they could do that was by encouraging people to eat more cheese, how did they go about doing this? By Make tastier cheeses? Decreasing prices? No don’t be silly, mass propaganda and marketing tricks to make people associate fondue- a cheese dish that heavily used gruyere cheese, as the national dish of Switzerland. And, it worked, in the 1930s they ramped up the fondue psyop to the masses and like usual they lapped it up (subscribe now) so much so that the dish was now associated with national pride becoming one of the national dishes of Switzerland. So snow is blowing cheese is flowing and profits were growing. Life is great, well not if you are a cheese rebel that is. That’s right there were cheese rebels, who sought to oppose the monopoly and monoculture of cheese production that the cartels had created. Most famous of which was a man called Sepp Barmettler, an apt name for a man who was going to meddle with the big cheese. He wanted to add another variety of cheese production into the mainstream and spent 8 years sending applications and pestering the union to accept his newer softer Sbrinz cheese. They of course denied his applications replying to him in a letter that said “ you do not fit into the envisaged structures.” Which has no reason to go as hard as it does, but best believe I will be using this in as many scenarios as I can.

[majik-ninja]

You'd better have good protection for your family if you're going at the swiss cartel

[moneyobsessed]

Italian here, parmigiano reggiano is a sort of cheese cartel, only members can produce it, even if the producer is from the same area as DOP product.

[WelcomeToDERPLAND]

"everyone wants things... but things cost money..."

Truly, a tragedy

[samuelmcdonald]

OASIS OF CONTENT IN THE DESERT OF YOUTUBE

[Tnch]

Stoic stick gets a yellow mark of no money on a video.
Stoic: "Hey Youtube, why do dis?"
Youtube: *You do not fit into the envisiaged structures.*

[CG-yqxy]

Honorable mention goes to:
- The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers
- The California Raisin Reserve
- Luxottica Group S.p.A
- The Ivory Coast-Ghana Cocoa Initiative

Also I guess that those gulf oil countries need to be mentioned too.

[asahearts]

The thing about the lightbulbs, though, is that you can make them last almost forever, but as a consequence they aren't very good. The brighter the incandescent light, the shorter its lifespan.

[frogmastiff]

It’s incredible to think that not only did this inspire the original Star Wars trilogy it’s also the reason they shot jfk, mlk, and was covered up in the watergate scandal

[Goober_gobbler]

Didn’t the US government also buy a crap ton of its own cheese to keep up the price, and now it has like a billion pounds of cheese stuffed into their emergency cheese caves. They used to give it to poor people, as “government cheese”

[Constantineopulos]

You’re beginning to eclipse Mr. Onella in my eyes, good sir. I think your humor is getting to me more and more. Love it, keep it up

[TQFMTradingStrategies]

We also created too much cheese here in the USA with heavy handed dairy subsidy’s.
We decided to hide it in a cave and give it away for free and stuff,
You can still get goverment cheese that’s been aged in some random cave in Pennsylvania

[ReaperCH]

Very interesting. As a Swiss, I didn't know how deep that went. Btw, we also had a beer cartel (which also had rebels).

[GeoPRS-rmqy]

Stoic Stick might be the "employee of the month" on the vast Youtube platform.

[anthonyevangelisti]

So America wasn’t the only country with a cheese problem

[SangoProductions]

On the "planned obsolescence" of lightbulbs, we can look to the longest continually lit lightbulb the Centennial Light, which lasted for 120 years. Good for it.
Now... How much light does it give off? Yeah, not much (around 4 watts). Doesn't even compare to a candle. This is obviously impractical.
Power = light. But power also reduces the lifespan. There's a cost-benefit there. It's a fundamental limit of the way that the thermal lightbulbs made their light. (If you want a more detailed explanation of why burning a candle with a brighter flame makes the candle last a reduced duration, just ask and I'll give it.)

[toiletfx]

The Phoebus Cartel acrually had a use, to make lightbulbs perform more similarly. Technology Connections made a great video about the topic.

[Berthier_Enjoyer]

About the ligthbulbs. It's more complicated than that. You can easily make an incandescent lightbulb last a long time, but it won't be very bright. If you ever look at the lightbulbs that have lasted 100 years or more you will see that they all aren't very bright. There is a tradeoff between lifespan, brightness and energy efficiency and the sweet spot was where the "cartel" set it at.

[guavaguy]

I love how your just add arms and legs to logos and countries. The little feet on the legs is the cherry on top.

[Zorro]

You neglected to mention how the De Beers monopoly was enforced by the South African state, which is why it stayed around so long. Haven't looked into lightbulbs or quinine but I bet a similar deal came about.

[cold]

I am literally an Organic Chemist and I had no clue about the Quinine Cartel