Syndrome hammocks

I have enjoyed watching, and re-watching, a great Pixar movie called The Incredibles, with my 5 year old son.

A verbose villain, named Syndrome, is bent on destroying our animated superheroes in a for-profit scheme to eliminate all superheroes...

Syndrome: ...I'll sell my inventions so that *everyone* can have powers. *Everyone* can be super! And when everyone's super--
[chuckles evilly]
--no one will be.

Syndrome's statement is rooted in an ideology known as Communism.

The same force drives comfort out of the hammock market.

An enormous industrial complex fuels the explosion of cheap shammocks flooding the hammock market. Google, with interests in China, holds the floodgates open for a fee.

Communism seeks to destroy individualism (i.e. intellectual property rights), and in doing so, destroy any unique strength or superiority that any individual might claim alone.

The theory is that the greater good will be served by sharing everything, allowing no one to (visibly) rise above his peers. Somehow this is supposed to allow everyone to rise.

At the core of Communism, is this lie, that by making everyone and every thing visibly equal on the surface, everyone can share wealth and comfort equally.

We know this concept is fatally flawed. The result is shared failure on a mass scale, a vast displacement of wealth and comfort, and a hidden realm of lies and deceit where lives and dreams are shattered and fortunes are secretly hoarded.

The same forces applies to hammock manufacturing and related intellectual property.

Thanks to The Comfort Compromise of The HammockSource, there are now thousands of factories in China churning out hammocks, the same as they make any other item, shaving it down by the cost model, to be as cost competitive as possible.

In China factories, hammocks are just another "item" thrown in the mix. The same mega-factory making hammocks also makes toilet plungers, ice scrapers, curtain rods, wrist watches, and literally hundreds of other "items."

There is no specialization, and no optimization of comfort built into that model.

Ten years ago, there were virtually no hammocks coming from China.

Central planners in China spread the word to every factory that can make a hammock - "this type item is very profitable! . . . 70 million baby-boomers are retiring. Hammock is in their future!"

Today, the Hammock Gold Rush is in full-swing and thousands of Chinese factories make hammocks because they top the list of "must have items" that Americans desire.

So what you, the hammock consumer, are now faced with, is a vast sea of choices.

It's ironic - choices are good right? Very capitalistic!

And yet most of these choices are shammocks.

Not surprisingly, a "Communist hammock" a.k.a. "shammock" is not comfortable.

These are Syndrome hammocks (remember our villain?) ...

You won't see a difference because now everyone is super (everyone makes and sells shammocks), and soon no one will be (comfortable).

A true hammock provides the highest level of human comfort.

However, shammocks now prevail, thanks to the Communist version of equality in the hammock market.

All products are treated equally. All products are down-graded as the shaved-down cost model is applied.

No China factory stands to make a profit manufacturing a quality hammock alongside a toilet plunger.

Every factory can make shammocks because they are nothing special.

Every factory moves some product, China moves forward.

Every China factory that can make a shammock, does so by mandate. No single factory holds a great portion of the overall manufacturing business.

The result is that there are thousands of "hammocks" for American retailers to buy direct from China at dirt cheap prices.

And there are now thousands of new retailers buying and selling them online.

Thousands of distinctions without differences:

thousands of distinct shammock models, made from dozens of materials, with dozens of print patterns, fibers, and colors, in hundreds of configurations. Comfort subtracted.

NO DIFFERENCE, no comfort, same shammock!

Think about the consequences of displacing and destroying easy access to comfort.

It's an invisible but insidious shift going on right now.

The integrity of the hammock market is in the hands of a very few people who care about comfort, and the consumers who educate themselves and talk to one another about the facts.

We work without a net so you don't have to. Keep talking, keep rocking.

www.hammocks.org