Constant Returns to Scale
Categories: Financial Theory, Investing
When an increase in inputs (think lemons, sugar, and labor) causes the same, proportional increase in output (think lemonade).
Got two more lemons, two more sugar cubes, and two more minutes? Two more lemonades, coming up.
In contrast, there’s also “decreasing returns to scale,” otherwise known as “scales of economy,” which is when you get big enough that you get disproportionately more output with more input. Which is why mega corporations can put mom n' pop shops out of business. Mega corporations are saving on costs thanks to decreasing returns to scale, while mom n' pop shops are dealing with constant returns to scale.
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Finance allah shmoop What does it mean to scale Well
here's a squid eyeball from space fifty miles away and
here's a squid eyeball from our boat the pesca squid
alia's from a mile away and here's a squid eyeball
from the view of our iphone we just dropped in
the water when the squids when right beneath the boat
scaring the crap out of us literally at one scale
we could barely see the ocean At another scale We
saw way too much eye ball scale and business has
the same kind of dramatic effect as operations come into
play That is it's One thing to serve lemonade drinks
to one hundred people a week It takes one stand
a permit grocery store visits worth of supplies it's completely
Another thing Toe serve a million drinks a week for
the latter You need infrastructure trucks storage and armies of
servers to you know serve Yeah that's what they do
someone's gotta get lemonades to the people So when a
company scales it means that they have gone from a
modest few million dollars of sales to sales of maybe
one hundred million and then a billion Some like that
The skill set for the former is a vastly different
set than for the ladder and some people are able
to do both Howard schultz founder and ceo of starbucks
We're looking at you well starbucks started off is just
one store in seattle in like five minutes later there
were a gazillion of them all over the world thinking
of coffee in any language So yeah that's How a
company scales from you little toe Big big Incidentally you'll
want to stay off the scale if you consume venti
caramel frappe with whip on a daily basis but on 00:01:44.897 --> [endTime] there so good