The Great Merger Movement was an event that took place primarily in the United States, from around 1895 to around

1905, though it continued in a less dramatic and frantic fashion until around 1929. During this period,

more than 1,800 companies were sucked up into other companies through consolidation, meaning there were

nearly 2,000 fewer companies in the United States after the dust settled, and the ones

remaining were all larger than before, made up of a Voltron-like combination of previously

smaller entities that joined together to become a more

powerful, unified whole. The idea here was to create larger business entities that would be

capable of clobbering their competitors through the benefits of economies of scale,

access to a larger number of compatible patents, and the soft power of

increased brand recognition amongst their existing and potential customers. It's theorized

that this merger mania was the consequence of the panic of 1893, which, interestingly,

began with a wheat crop failure in Argentina, expanded with a gold run

on the U.S. Treasury, and ended with four years of economic depression that impacted all

U.S.-based industries, and set into motion a realignment of the U.S. political system that, among other things,

meant Republicans would control the White House for 28 of the next 36 years. So the idea here is that,

spooked by the very recent economic depression, business entities wanted to create unbreakable

advantages within their space, which would in turn allow them to set overall higher prices on their

goods and services. They had just spent four years charging lower prices due to the depression,

and some of them were done holding on by a thread,

and they wanted to be able to expand and build up their economic reserves for a while in case something like that happened again in the future.

Now, unfortunately, for them, their efforts seemed to have had the opposite effect.

As they scaled up and took more power, it increased their prices,

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