Shane Parrish
speaker
20,679 appearances
49 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Shane Parrish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 30 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 4.
Appearances
What the railroads needed was one customer big enough to hand them each an agreed share of the oil traffic, month after month, and make the piece stick.
No customer had ever been large enough to make that work.
Standard Oil, though, had now grown big enough to be that customer.
So the railroad men proposed a scheme, and it came with a shell company that had a deliberately boring name.
They called it the South Improvement Company.
A handful of the biggest refiners would join.
Standard Oil would be by far the dominant member, with Rockefeller in his circle holding the largest block of the new company's stock.
The members would agree to guarantee the railroad steady traffic.
And in exchange, the railroads would grant the refiners three things.
First, they would give them rebates.
The railroads would publicly double all of their freight rates, but then they would secretly hand the members half the rate back.
Only companies not in the South Improvement Co.
would pay retail.
Second, and this was the real innovation, something called drawbacks.
The railroads would also pay members an additional cut of what their competitors paid in freight.
On one route, for example, Standard Oil would collect as a rebate 40 cents for every barrel it shipped, and then they'd receive another 40 cents for every barrel its competitors shipped.
Rivals would partly be funding the war chest of the very company crushing them, and the biggest rivals would be funding them the most.
Third, it gave them information.
The railroads would also report the members' competitor shipments.
Every shipper, every barrel, every destination would be reported almost in real time.
Showing 1361–1380 of 20,679 · page 69 of 1034
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