Doug Freyburger said:To do Atkins correctly you need a copy of the book, and
realistically you need that copy longer than the library
will loan it for. So there's six bucks spent on Atkins
products. Beyond that every penny spent on their products
is optional fluff. Core low carb food is veggies, meat,
dairy, eggs and such, none of which are Atkins prodcts.
All of their products are either completely optional like
their snacks or they have plenty of competitors like their
supplements.
I can buy a copy of DANDR for $.75 + 2.79 for shipping on half.com.
There were several copies available. Same for Atkins 4 Life. Of which,
the company gets nothing. Additionally, the books are published by Avon
Books, so likely, a royalty payment goes to Dr. Atkins estate, which
may include the foundation. I suspect that AN gets nothing from the
pre-death books, only getting money from the new stuff that no one
seems to like. If this were my business model, I think I would rethink
it a little and try to figure where the profit zone is in LC living.
Quoted message said:At one point almost no one was funding low carb studies.
Dr A founded the company so its profits would go into a
foundation that would fund low carb studies. I don't
know what happened to that original intent but somewhere
along the way they went public and got marketed more and
more. I have no idea what portion of the profits go to
that foundation.
Once you get investors, you get some problems, like demands for growth,
in a quarterly fashion. In the long term, if LC is actually better for
you than anything else, the studies to prove it make the case. Of
course, by that time, the profit zone moves because you have other LC
plans come out (qv sommersizing, south beach, et al). And you have to
move to something else as a business (Dr. Atkins probably made plenty
of money from his practice and the books, but the business, with
investors, necessarily becomes bigger than Dr. Atkins private wealth).
Quoted message said:Not just money grubbing, but they depict the products as
low carb food somehow implying that they are good or important
or whatever not strictly optional yet convenient. There
are also debates over truth in carb counts on the labels,
listing products in the plan at a time when they carb ladder
says certain ingredients shouldn't be tried yet and numerous
other breaches of the basic principles that should make the
ANA a simple process.
Yeah. I recall when I first LC'd back in 2002, each Atkins product
listed what phases of the diet it would be appropriate for. Very few
were induction friendly, as I recall, with most of the breads and such
being for pre-maintenance and maintenance. I think Atkins' death
certainly hurt the business and possibly the diet phase of the WOL, in
much the same way that Walt Disney's death hurt his company until the
advent of Michael Eisner (if you have a good memory and followed
business, you might recall that Saul Steinberg was going to turn
Disneyland into a graveyard, because it would offer better returns).
One last thing, you can get 90% of the information in the book for free
from the Atkins website and filling in with google. This is not a
business model I would want to stake my retirement on.
Hollywood, the resident LC MBA
264/257/218
