Baron von Munnigrabber was furious. He was so angry he stormed out of his own dinner party before the end of the first course. All his guests were sent home.
The baron reckoned his guests were exchanging messages. They were conspiring against him, cheating him of the pots of money he was expecting to make. They were behaving anticompetitively and needed to be taught a lesson.
For this was no ordinary dinner party. It was a business negotiation, not a social occasion. The guests were competing soft drink wholesalers all wanting access to the baron’s source of natural mineral water. They were competing in an auction for bottling rights.
The extended Munnigrabber family had a monopoly on mineral water across most of Europe. They built their castles above the springs and sold bottling rights to a select group of wholesalers. Mineral water was a scarce resource after all. You could not let just anyone drink from the spring.
It was a solid but unexciting business. But now it was changing. The water was the same, but the marketing was not. Future water gushing from the spring would be different. It would be a magic potion with extraordinary powers. It could make you see things. It turned you into a human transceiver, sending and receiving moving images at will across the globe. People were excited. They couldn’t wait to get their hands on the designer bottles.
The final touch was inspirational. Evocative branding to indicate magical powers. Demand for “ThreejeeSpectrum” was guaranteed.
Baron von Munnigrabber knew he was on a winner. He had already ordered a spectacular chandelier for his banqueting hall. His castle dominated a small but prosperous country sandwiched between Germany and Italy. His fellow Munnigrabbers in other countries had already made their fortunes by skillful auctioning of bottling rights, blackmailing bottlers with threats of losing existing business unless they paid outrageous sums for future rights.
Not every Munnigrabber played by the rules. An obscure northern branch of the family almost ruined the scheme by thinking of the public’s interests. They gave away the bottling rights! They simply threw away the chance to make pots of money. But they were a strange branch of the family, living most of their lives in darkness and speaking a weird language no one understood. No point trying to talk to them.
The Anglo-Saxon Munnigrabbers saved the day. Isolated on a small Atlantic island, they tricked the bottlers into paying astronomical sums. Sums that exceeded the legal lending limit of the bottlers’ supporting banks. Some bottlers may never get ThreejeeSpectrum to market, and the public could be deprived of the magic potion. But the Munnigrabbers did not care. They had the cash already. It was chandeliers all round. No wonder the baron was excited.
He knew he had to play his cards carefully. His cousin to the south had already been outsmarted. One of the bottlers suddenly “felt a little faint” and unsportingly left the table before the stakes got high. The rest were free to walk away with their prizes, giggling quietly to themselves.
Baron von Munnigrabber’s relative to the north had been more clever. He knew the bottlers would try to keep the price down. So he made the auction so complex no one understood what was going on. Bottling rights depended on the time of day and the phase of the moon. It worked. Prices were again astronomical.
So the baron thought he had it made. Until the wicked bottlers started their supposed signalling tricks. How dare they! Who did they think they were trying to protect? They will not be allowed to get away with it.
No one bothered to ask the public. They may think differently. Apart from the chandelier makers, of course.
