One company for each of the deadly sins
We have a rule in our family. No delivery from restaurants within walking distance of the house. If it’s close, we go and get it, or we sit down and eat it there.
We started ordering from a place four minutes away during the pandemic, when eating there was not allowed and being out in the evening was a paperwork exercise. The food came colder and cost more. That was a fair trade at the time, and part of it was wanting to keep the place in business. Then the restrictions lifted. We just kept ordering, one busy evening at a time, long after the reasons were gone.
Last week, waiting for someone outside a supermarket, I saw a Glovo courier walking out with a bag holding two bottles of cheap soda and two bottles of water. It didn’t look like a weekly shop. Soda and water, in a neighbourhood with a proximity store every hundred metres. And I thought: somebody had paid a fee and waited twenty minutes to avoid four. The lift down, a hundred metres, and the lift back up.
My first reaction was the judgmental one. Then I remembered that we only made the rule because we were doing the same thing.
Then it hit me. Somebody has built a very large business on sloth, and once you see that, you start looking for the other six. Capital sins.
So let’s play a summer parlour game. Seven sins, one company each. The uncomfortable part is that the list flatters the companies more than it flatters us.
Sloth: Glovo. The food is incidental. What you’re buying is the removal of four minutes and one decision, and it costs about two euros.
Gluttony: Coca-Cola. A hundred and thirty years of selling thirst to people who weren’t thirsty, on top of the best distribution system ever built.
Greed: I couldn’t pick one. Betting apps, crypto exchanges, and the retail trading apps that look nothing like either until you read the disclosures. All of them sell the mathematically impossible, one with sponsorship deals, the rest with charts. Too crowded to have a winner yet, which tells you how big the appetite is.
Envy: Instagram. The product is other people’s holidays, kitchens and bodies, sorted by whatever performs best. Then the ads arrive to sell you the gap.
Pride: Rolex. Less accurate than a twenty-euro quartz watch, and it appreciates. The accuracy was never the product.
Wrath: X. Anger is the cheapest engagement there is, because it needs no content, only a target. Nobody puts this in the annual report.
Lust: Tinder. It sells sex, and it sells it by the month. The clever part is that nobody using it has to say so.
The strong ones play on several levels. Instagram runs envy, pride and sloth at the same time, which is why it beats anything operating on a single sin. If your business maps cleanly onto only one, you’re probably in a commodity category.
The strongest ones own both ends. Sell the indulgence, then sell the penance. Philip Morris sells cigarettes and also sells the device marketed as the way out of cigarettes, and says publicly it wants a smoke-free future while the cigarettes pay for the transition. Same customer, same appetite, two invoices.
Here’s the part that matters, and it isn’t the sins. It’s the asymmetry. A business built on a want will always move faster than a business built on a need, because the want does the selling for you and the need has to be argued every single time.
Which brings me back to the rule. We made it because delivery worked on us. A product that requires a personal rule to use responsibly is a product doing its job extremely well.
If nobody has had to invent a rule about your product yet, you’re probably selling a need. That’s the slower business, and it’s why the companies above grew faster than yours. The useful question is whether there’s a want buried somewhere inside what you sell, and whether you’ve ever tried selling that instead.
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