EclecticLip

I linked to a FlowingData post on WalMart’s growth across the US, earlier.
They’ve now got a similar graph showing the growth of Target - which, as it turns out, started up in the same year.

From what it seems, this is a business analogue of convergent evolution.

In biological cases, different species may develop similar traits, especially if they’re targeting the same ecological niche.  In this business case, Target and WalMart both started off aiming to be low-cost department-store vendors; aiming for this economic niche, they seem to have independently come up with very similar formulas for successful suburban “big box” retailing.

Curiously, while Target’s main colour is red (and WalMart is blue), Target is reputed to generally support Democrats (”blue states”) while WalMart generally supports Republicans (”red states’).

This is different from what happened with the trio of McDonald’s - Wendy’s - Burger King, which is a business analogue of horizontal gene transfer.

HGT is a process whereby one organism takes genes from another.  This doesn’t seem to happen between “higher” life forms (like us) but is apparently fairly common among “lower” life forms. When bacteria develop drug resistance, it could be that some bacteria were drug-resistant to begin with, and that only those bacteria survived to reproduce.  But since bacteria swap genes near-indiscriminately with each other, bacteria-species-A might have acquired the gene for drug-resistance from bacteria-species-B!

Indeed, HGT is the biggest challenge to the Darwinian idea of a tree of life; Darwin assumed genetic variation is only caused by transmission from parents to offspring.  The “family-values” version of evolution, if you will.

HGT implies that genetic variation — at least among the single-celled creatures who started us off — could also come by transmission between any two organisms which got close enough to do the microbial equivalent of French kissing.  This superimposes an “orgy” layer atop the “family-values” model above.

In the fast food example above, the founders of Wendy’s and Burger King both heard of McDonald’s success, and went to California to study the business.  They then returned to their stomping grounds (Wendy’s - Ohio; Burger King - Florida) and started up their own versions.  This is a business analogue to HGT, because the Wendy’s and Burger King corporations didn’t independently come up with the business model, they copied it from McDonald’s.