Comment by no_wizard
2 days ago
> They cost most when a business can bear the costs least.
Shouldn't a reasonable business have been investing forward to avoid this problem? IE, you don't use todays dollars, you use yesterdays dollars.
Its seems the flaw is that they lacked sufficient savvy to invest the pensions in a way where it would be able to build upon itself.
It's more-- you build a tidy SaaS business. It's stable for a while. You want to be generous and skilled workers are in demand, so you offer a pension. This is good for a while, maybe a long while, and you "invest forward" as appropriate.
Then, a competitor disrupts your segment. The competitor is new, and for whatever reason does not have the same legacy pension expense. In order to compete, you must invest. But your pension expense in particular does not allow this.
What does the legacy enterprise do in this situation? In many cases in the 20th century, per Patrick, the business lost relevancy and slowly went bankrupt.