Ryan Holiday

And turn out you're full of shit.

Yes.

Yeah.

You roll them up, you create a centralized structure, you eliminate inefficiencies.

Well, as I say, it's not a principle until it costs you something.

Right.

And I told this story for many years when I talk about the Stoic virtues about this decision that CVS made like a decade and a half ago.

They just decided that if we're like a health company, why do we sell cigarettes?

Right.

Like it's bad for people and we're gonna stop.

So they do, and it costs them, I don't know, a billion dollars a year or something in revenue.

And people are like, why?

Like the rationalization to sell it is lots of other stores sell cigarettes.

And if people wanna get cigarettes, they'll just buy them somewhere else.

And so they're like, look, if people buy this many cigarettes a year and CVS stops participating, the same amount of cigarettes will be sold.

It'll just be distributed a little bit differently.

But actually what happened is cigarette sales nationwide go down.

Not like significantly, but just some percentage of those people that used to buy it from their neighborhood CVS or the one they would walk by in New York City just stopped.

They smoked less cigarettes because they were harder to get.

So they make this decision that's probably mostly about branding and...