And another person without any real world experience in this field...no, that's not how it work. You know what WalMart pays YOU, you don't know what they pay someone else for the very same product as that price will vary depending on deals made, supply, demand and possibly the season, as well as location, potential shipping costs and so on. It's NOT a simple thing, there's a reason why so many people start businesses each day and fail, they think like you folks do. It's so easy, you can get the prices for everything and always know what's profitable, you can't fail to get rich! Only, it doesn't work that way at all, they go out of business because of that fact.
I know what my company(we provide cellphone service) pays for our cellphone network time with each of our providers, but I don't know what our competitors pay for it from those same providers, the provider won't tell me, nor will our competitors. There's a reason we have legal paperwork our employees must sign that doesn't allow them to discuss that information with anyone outside of the company, legal paperwork that is rather common in many different fields today. That is proprietary information, it's not given out to anyone who hasn't signed NDAs. We've had our ex-employees hired up by our competitors just to get that information, we know this, two of them actually had that information and we know they gave it to the competitor they were hired by after we fired them. And as soon as they gave that information out, they were fired, our competitor didn't want people we'd fired, they just wanted that intel. I got a call from one of our provider's rep asking why we'd told a competitor what we were paying shortly after that, that isn't allowed in our contract and she wasn't very happy with us for violating it. I was able to explain the situation and avoided a penalty charge against our company and them raising what we were paying, as per our contract. I used to work for one of the largest wholesale suppliers in the US for grocery stores, lots of NDAs in the onboarding process, and as the head of IT for them, I'm real aware of exactly how tightly all price information was controlled INSIDE the company. Prices were physically mailed to our customers, they weren't sent over the internet, and all of those physical lists were triple checked to make sure the right list went to the right location, gods help you if you sent the wrong list to the wrong customer, people got fired mistakes like that.
THAT is how the real world works, there's no sharing of information like you folks seem to think, no idea where people get that idea, unless it's from video games showing stupidly simple economies in action? Nah, that couldn't possibly be where that comes from....*looks at the thread*...oh...right.
. It has given me some great ideas for additional tool functionality, though.
