Tag changed since this is getting into the theory of economics.

Comrade Glaser wrote:
> While I agree on the practical aspect of SMD, I'm not sure about the
> this bit. Maybe the same people who are "hurting themselves and
> looking laughable in the process" are those who still have a
> "charmingly naive but morally sound" belief that large companies may
> actually be interested in what they the
> customers want, rather than what "the ones who spend the most money"
> want,

But that's who the customers are.

> who still believe in the ethics and values that got left behind
> a very long time ago, with the ever more desperate scramble for money
> and power.

That's getting silly.  You are trying to make it sound like a moral dilemma
when it's nothing of the sort.  Companies are going to make what their
customers want.  That's exactly what they should be doing, and is the basis
for the capitalist system.  Nobody* wants thru hole parts.  They want
smaller and cheaper and easier to install SMD parts.  So that's what parts
manufacturers are making.  Doing anything else would be immoral because it
would be unfair to their owners (the stockholders) and detrimental to the
majority of people

Let's say a company continued making obsolete parts.  The return on the
investment to keep producing these parts is poorer than that on making the
parts customers actually want.  That means this company has less to spend on
everything else, which includes development of cheaper/better future
products the customers want.  Not only does this immediately hurt that
company and therefore its owners, but it also robs the world of better
products in the future.

Your system is just plain broken.  Fortunately, most of the time people like
you don't get put into a position of power to make such decisions, and even
then they get weeded out in a competetive market by decreasing sales.

> Certainly in a business sense it works, only sell the
> products that make the most money,

Exactly.  You make it sound like a bad thing, but it's actually a good
thing.

> but...
> I asked why my local supermarket had stopped selling a certain spice,
> I was told it couldn't "justify" the shelf space, so it was replaced
> with some of another more popular one - progress?

Absolutely.  Even forgetting about profit for individual companies, look at
the bigger picture.  The amount of shelf space in your local area is limited
and costs a certain amount to maintain.  There are always more products that
could be on those shelves than there is available space.  Therefore shelf
space needs to be rationed in some way or another.  By definition, some
products aren't going to get shelf space.  So how do you decide which ones
get it and which ones don't?  Popularity of a products sounds like one
reasonable measure.  Doesn't it make sense that allocating shelf space to a
spice 100 people buy regularly should have priority over one that only 10
people buy regularly.  You seem to forget that every time you pick a winner,
you're also implicitly picking losers.  Something has to be given up to get
your spice on the shelves.  It's not free.

You're only griping because you're one of the 10 that didn't get their
product.  That's self-centered and short sighted.  Get over it.  Keep in
mind you're probably on the winning end of a great many more tradeoffs.
You'd likely lose big if your philosophy was applied to the vast majority of
products you buy.  You'd have stores full of spare parts for wooden wagon
wheels, bread wrapped in paper instead of plastic, unpasturized milk, etc,
etc, etc.  It's hard to imagine the infinity of useless products that your
store is not wasting shelf space on, thereby allowing you to buy products
you actually want.  And this doesn't even get into who decides what products
should be carried, and how much the commissar of spices needs to be paid off
to decree your favorite spice that nobody else wants should be carried.
Remarkably, this system has actually been tried, and of course found not to
work.  No thanks.

* While there are a few customers that would buy more thru hole parts,
"nobody" is a pretty good first order approximation if you look at the very
tiny fraction of thru hole parts that would be bought compared to SMD even
if both were equally available at prices proportional to their cost to
produce.


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