The Cutest Monopoly

> “If you have a monopoly just because you’re the only one who happens to make something and no one else wants to make it, there's nothing wrong with that,” Milici says.

> “US antitrust law doesn’t prohibit monopolies. It prohibits conduct by monopolists.”

> Meanwhile, companies like Crayola (83%) or Gatorade (63%) have faced little scrutiny.

AFAIK, none of these companies are known to engage in prohibited conduct, so that's probably why they've not had much scrutiny.

You don't hear about Koala Kare forcing you into buying anything else if you want their change stations, or anything like that. There's free competition, but the Koala stations seem to work well and so there you go. If RubberMade is one of the major alternates and they can't sell a lot of them, I dunno ... RubberMade products are very common in commercial buildings.

Same thing with Crayola, maybe they've got some super secret thing where they buy up all the crayon making supplies, or maybe everyone else just makes shitty crayons and you only have to get burned a couple times before you're like Crayola crayons are always reasonable, just gonna buy those. Maybe not their markers though, I'm partial to Sanford's Mr. Sketch Scented Markers.

For the sake of this publication, I hope that they got paid by Google (in money or favours) for this rambling low-quality "article".

A dominant position in an open market with zero lock-in, is completely inconsequential to antitrust laws. Unless nefarious behaviour is alleged, it just means the product (and/or the branding) is superior.

Can anyone replace a Koala product with an alternative, without suffering any repercussion? Yes. Can anyone build a bathroom without buying from Koala? Also yes. Will your bathroom continue to work if you remove a Koala product? Still yes. Are consumers or businesses suffering from this market dominance? Not really (I guess Koala can command slightly premium prices, but we're talking plastic building supplies here - the margins will likely be pretty low already).

This has nothing to do with big-tech cases.

As an Australian, I always find American companies adopting Australian imagery a bit jarring. It can result in an "uncanny valley" feeling, in which something which comes across as rather American (because it is) but has a superficial layer of Australianness layered atop. Cultural appropriation, perhaps?

Koala Kare isn't the worst. The worst by far, in my opinion, is "Outback Steakhouse". I remember when they first opened in Australia (in the 1990s or early 2000s???), they didn't even bother to metricate their menu. It felt weird, ordering American style food in a putatively Australian restaurant in the western suburbs of Sydney, with a menu telling you the size of steak in ounces instead of the usual grams. And I never went back to one, until sometime last decade, I was in San Mateo, California, and I was hungry and bored, so I thought I'd give them another go. And there was absolutely nothing Australian about the place except the name and imagery. And then they serve Fosters – which is a beer few Australians actually drink any more (I remember my dad drinking it in the 1980s), and few places in Australia even sell it. In fact, I'm pretty sure there was a period when they stopped brewing and selling it in Australia altogether; apparently more recently they've relaunched it and you can buy it again, but I can't remember seeing it on sale. In my life, I've drunk far more Fosters while in India than I ever have in Australia.

Only tangentially related, when my kids were younger, I used "changing table in the men's bathroom" as a useful measure of company health. It a) costs little, and b) required little care to make the decision, but a company or building that couldn't manage those two things was either broke or stagnant.

It seems the author does not see the difference between a monopoly on a service as opposed to a monopoly on a product. These changing stations can be replaced without any difficulty, by another brand, if the need arises. For services or whole ecosystems, such as Google and Apple (iCloud, Apple Pay, etc) there is a huge vendor lock-in, even for consumers. Monopolies in the latter are unwanted most of the time. But being the major manufacturer and distributor of some non-consumer-bought public bathroom equipment doesn't really do much harm, since a competitor can arise relatively easily if need be.

This is a monopoly without lock-in or network effect. As such, it really isn't a priority.

If KoalaCare raises prices or collapses quality, they'll get a competitor. A maintenance department can replace every single changing station in a big office building in a month if they wanted to.

> In the age of antitrust, why has Koala Kare, Big Baby Change Station, flown under the radar?

Proportionality, it seems. Why has nobody sued the printer ink monopolists? Because compared to Google or Apple they're somewhat of a lesser evil.

There’s nothing cute about a shit-smeared slab of gray plastic that you’re desperately trying to wipe clean while also fighting to hold on to a writhing toddler with a poopy diaper who is trying to shove the public bathroom’s communal toilet plunger into his mouth.

I’m glad these things exist. I am also glad I now carry what are essentially puppy pads for lining these things. And I am glad that Cocomelon screen time on YouTube is enough of a treat to get him to behave during diaper changes.

If you aren’t familiar with Cocomelon, consider yourself lucky… https://www.animationmagazine.net/2024/05/cocomelon-continue...

> The Koala joined the ranks of omnipresent brands that have surpassed the generic names for what they make: think Kleenex, Chapstick, Play-Doh, and so on.

I was surprised when someone said to me "do you want a tempo?" after I sneezed. I had to ask them to clarify before I got it

I think a problem gets more problematic the larger the market is. A monopoly in a 100 million market is probably less harmful than a monopoly in a trillion market. It also depends on the lock in effect. I don't think this company has any moat besides its brand name, its sales force and good products.

Strange article. Did someone at the executive level of this company commit some faux pas against the author or editor of this site? There's no meat here, just a sirt of half-assed execution of a once-off "vendetta" of some kind.

I enjoyed the synopsis origin story though.

Re: Gatorade’s 63% monopoly, I’ve recently thought about how quickly Prime went to mass market. It seems like it blew up on YouTube and stores couldn’t keep it in stock.

Then all of the sudden, it’s sitting next to Gatorade in huge volumes at Costco.

I’ve never seen a product so quickly “disrupt” a long-time monopoly. It remains to be seen whether it’s a fad or if they could actually compete with Gatorade, but it seems like they could, if anyone could.

To be clear, I’m personally not a fan of how companies like this use marketing (especially on YouTube) targeting young — impressionable — audiences, so I’m not necessarily rooting for either one of them (Gatorade is horribly unhealthy). But I have found it interesting at the very least.

“You think you’re supposed to put a human baby on that mouse trap of a device. They have gang signs carved into them. Those are for snorting coke off of.” - John Mulaney

Not really a monopoly, as there are several competing brands. At least abroad. There are plenty of other markets with an dominating actor where competition isn't harmed, so it's not considered problematic in the antitrust sense.

One should probably take the invention story here as just a story, foldable diaper changing stations were starting to get common in 1986, at least in the Nordics.

> An architect stating something like "We always specify Hubbell wiring devices, Sherwin Williams paint, and Koala Care changing stations wherever applicable

Yeah, my take is that it sounds like Koala Kare is really good about getting architects to specify their products in construction projects, but I never look at the Div 10 specs since it’s not my niche. I’ll have to take a look at some TI specs and see what I find.

Here’s a link to their canned spec section for 10 28 14 - Baby Changing Stations, .docx format: https://www.koalabear.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Section...

That first image is hilariously bad and wrong.

I'm suddenly reminded of an old tweet of mine: https://x.com/bradfitz/status/825404204055359488

"A moment of silence please for all the babies who fell off not-so-Sturdy Station v1. #ScaryVersionNumbers"

This is so bizarre as a non-US reader, I have literally never heard of them. (Despite having heard of all the others in the “monopoly by market share” table)