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I heard a good anecdote today about the tobacco industry. The source of this blockquote used to be a tobacco company executive.

My grandfather's tobacco company got put out of business by American Tobacco's sneaky tactics. His company was a regional roll-your-own-cigarette manufacturer in the South East. Their markets were North Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, etc. American offered to buy him out, but my grandfather was making a lot of money at the time and didn't want to sell.

When the big company couldn't buy his little company out, they started buying his product out. The American Tobacco delivery boys would come in to the grocery stores every Monday morning and purchase all of his brand tobacco on the shelves. Grandpa never knew this until much later, so it wasn't as easy as just re-stocking twice weekly.

What ended up happening was that American Tobacco would buy out our brand in the grocery store all around the region, and then our customers wouldn't have any choice but to buy another brand of tobacco. You couldn't find us in the grocery store because it looked like we were sold out! And that's terrible in this industry. You're not going to wait until next week to buy a product like tobacco- you're just going to pick another brand.