A few years ago I had a flat tire. I ended up driving to the nearest tire store. I was about 30 minutes away and there was only one tire left for the car to fit. I pulled in and looked around, but I really didn’t see any other tires. Then I saw the tire store owner. He looked at me and asked me. “How do you like your new tires?” I had a good laugh at the awkwardness of the question.
Its not that you just drive through someone and ask them how your tires are. But when you’re driving through tires, it’s a little awkward. One thing we’ve learned is that they are not always available. Especially in areas like New York City and Seattle, where the cost of driving through a tire store is prohibitive.
Tire recall is the process by which tire companies attempt to get their tires back on the road for use. For instance, tires that are pulled are recalled to be repaired or replaced. Tire recall is a controversial practice, and companies that fail to recall their tires end up receiving billions in fines. The US is a tire recall nation, and some of the largest tire recall companies are in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. New York City has the most tire recalls per capita.
Continental Tire is one of those companies that end up having a lot more recalls because they have such a large footprint in the US than they do elsewhere. In fact, they’ve been fined over $1 billion a year so far because of tire recalls.
Continental Tire seems to have a knack of issuing recalls when they’ve got something to do. During the last two recalls, for instance, Continental was fined over 1 billion dollars. That’s actually quite a bit of money in today’s dollars.
Thats not to say that Continental hasn’t had its share of recalls as well. In fact, they were fined over 300 billion dollars in the last five years, which is quite a bit more than Continental Tire.
Continental Tire has been called a “franchise” and a “monopoly” by the media. I say it’s probably a mix of both, though I would call it a “franchise” for the fact that they’ve apparently built a large factory to issue new tires (the issue which caused the recalls), and also because Continental Tire is a huge company with a lot of power.
I dont think you could really call Continental Tire a “franchise”. In fact, I think the word “franchise” would be better. I just like to use the word “monopoly” because that’s what it sounds like.
I think we can apply this to any company. The power of a company is what it makes available to its employees, shareholders, and customers. In the case of most companies, their power makes its employees and shareholders more powerful than it. The power of Continental Tire is that they are the number one tire maker in the world. I think its very clear that they do this because it provides them more money and power than any other manufacturer.
This seems to be what they are doing. They have a monopoly on the power of making tires which is why they can make so many of them because they are the only company that can. Now, they don’t need to make all the tires the same as any other tire maker, so they are making them different and unique. But there is one that is most similar with most people, so we can’t actually tell. So it is a monopoly.
