The Big Three Car Rental Companies in the US

Think you have lots of choices when it comes to selecting a rental car? Think again.

There are actually only three major rental-car companies in America: Avis, Hertz and Enterprise.   Those big three control 94 percent of the market.  No wonder rental-car prices are pretty much the same from company to company.  Are you now trying to name all the ones you've seen advertised?  Most of them are part of the same companies: Avis owns Budget and Zipcar.  Hertz owns Dollar and Thrifty, and Enterprise owns Alamo and National. 

Play Ball

As we near the end of another season of Major League Baseball, we can pause to think about threes in baseball.  Of The Big Three professional sports in the U.S., baseball, football and basketball, baseball is loaded with threes.  Baseball is three strikes, three outs, nine innings, nine players, and three bases (the fourth is called home plate).  Baseball is scored in hits, runs and errors.  Batters are at the plate, on deck or in the hole.  Baseball is the quintessential natural threes in sport.  

Baseball has the Triple Crown, which is awarded when one player in either the American League or the National League (or in some rare cases all of Major League Baseball) has the highest batting average, the most home runs and the most runs batted in during a single season.  Before Miguel Cabrera won the Triple Crown last year, Carl Yastremski was the last player to do it 45 years earlier while playing for the Boston Red Sox.  Only 14 players have achieved the feat.  Pitchers also have a triple crown for most wins, best earned run average and most strikeouts in a single season.  Winning the pitching Triple Crown has occurred more often.  Grover Cleveland Alexander did it three times.  

The Big Three Nutrients for Better Health

By Leigh Erin Connealy, M.D.

To function, the human body needs the nutrients in food. Your digestive system breaks down what you eat and delivers the nutrients via the bloodstream to cells throughout your body. Carbohydrates, fats, and proteins are key nutrients we obtain from food, along with fiber, water, vitamins, and minerals.

But what exactly are carbohydrates, fats, and proteins, and why are they so important? Let’s take a closer look at each one:

Carbohydrates are sugars and starches found in foods like vegetables, fruit, cereal, sugar, pasta, bread, rice, and beans. Often called carbs, they are the body’s primary fuel source. One key to healthy eating is understanding the difference between favorable carbs (vegetables and fruits) and unfavorable carbs (sugar, candy, cookies, pies, cakes, and refined foods like white rice).

Fats, like carbohydrates, have unfairly acquired a bad reputation. Fats are essential to good health, and it’s not an overstatement to say we cannot live without them. Like carbohydrates, fats provide energy, and some fats are better for us than others. Our bodies cannot produce essential fatty acids (EFAs), so we must obtain them from food or supplements containing omega-3s and omega-6s. I’ll explain these in more detail shortly.

Protein is an essential nutrient found in every cell of the body. Your body requires a steady supply of protein to create new cells and repair old ones. In addition, protein helps to regulate many bodily functions, playing various roles, such as enzymes and hormones responsible for certain chemical reactions. Protein can also yield energy during a shortage of fats and carbs. 

Three Layers of the Cloud

We hear about the cloud and cloud computing.  But did you know?…

“The ‘cloud of clouds’ has three distinct layers.  The outer one called ‘software as a service’ (SaaS), includes web-based applications such as Gmail, Google’s e-mail service, and Salesforce.com, which helps firms keep track of their customers….Going one level deeper, there is ‘platform as a service,’ (PaaS), which means an operating system living in the cloud.  Such services allow developers to write applications for the web and mobile devices.  Offered by Google, Salesforce.com and Microsoft, this market is also fairly easy to measure, since there are only a few providers, and their offerings have not really taken off yet….The most interesting layer—the only one that really deserves to be called ‘cloud computing,’ say purists—is infrastructure as a service (IaaS).  IaaS offers basic computing services from number crunching to data storage, which customers can combine to build highly adaptable computer systems.”  Market leaders are GoGrid, Rackspace and Amazon Web Services.  Amazon is by far the market leader, owning about 80 to 90% of the current capacity.  The cloud is estimated by Forrester Research to grow to $56 billion in 2020 from about $1 billion in 2010.           

from Threes, Chapter 8, “Threes in Business and Technology” 

Read more about the Cloud in my new Kindle mini-e-book, Threes in Business and Technology, that’s available now at Amazon.

The New Big Three Economies

Until just a few years ago the largest national economies existed in the developed world.  United States, Japan and Germany (The Big Three) achieved the largest gross domestic product (GDP) in 2000.  “Ten years ago rich countries dominated the world economy, contributing around two-thirds of global GDP after allowing for differences in purchasing power.  Since then that share has fallen to just over half.  In another decade it could be down to 40%.  The bulk of global output will be produced in the emerging world,” wrote The Economist in 2010.  In the last 20 years or so the developed and developing worlds have undergone a re-positioning with the explosion of rapidly expanding, formerly developing economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China, which are known collectively by the acronym BRIC.  In fact, Goldman Sachs’ projections suggest China will jump into the number two position in the new Big Three list by 2020 and will become number one, surpassing the United States by 2050, and India will become the third largest economy as measured by GDP unless something cataclysmic derails its unprecedented growth, which by some measures approaches 10% annually.   

Three forces will dictate China’s rise…demography, convergences and “gravity.” 

from Threes, Chapter 6, “Threes in Economics and Finance” 

Also included in my new Kindle mini-e-book, Threes in Economics and Finance, that's available now.

Thomas Jefferson’s Big Three

As cultures evolved, thinkers found answers to perplexing problems and concepts in groupings of three ideas or principles, first in science, then in social systems.  The concept of gravity remained a challenge until philosopher, astronomer and physicist Isaac Newton declared in the late 1600s there were three laws of motion.  More than 300 years later there are still three laws of motion.  No one has uncovered a fourth. 

Attorney, statesman and philosopher Francis Bacon wrote about inductive reasoning in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.  He formalized a method for investigating the natural world 400 years ago.  The method that’s still used today begins with the collection of data from which comes the formation of a hypothesis to explain the data.  Finally, the third step is the testing of the hypothesis, which if it holds up under scrutiny can become a theory.  He “argued that although philosophy at the time used the deductive syllogism to interpret nature, the philosopher should instead proceed through inductive reasoning from fact to axiom to law.”  Induction, deduction and analogy are considered to be the three forms of classical reasoning.       

Former U.S. president, statesman, inventor, attorney and author Thomas Jefferson, borrowing from British philosopher and physician John Locke, who followed in the empiricist tradition of Francis Bacon, declared “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” as those “unalienable rights” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence.  Jefferson drafted the Declaration at age 33.  He was the third U.S. president.  His writing inspired French citizens to seek their own independence using the rallying cry of “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.”  Jefferson called John Locke one of his three heroes.  The other two were Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton.    

from Threes, Chapter 1, “The Wonder of Threes”

Also included in my new Kindle mini-e-book, Threes in Government and Politics, available now from Amazon. 

The Big Three in Business

Being perceived as one of the top three in a market, regardless of industry, industry sector or market size, is critically important.  These market leaders are or can be referred to as The Big Three. 

Big Three U.S. automakers: Ford, GM, Chrysler

Big Three U.S. broadcast television networks:

NBC, ABC, CBS

Big Three national economies: U.S., Japan, China

Big Three denim jeans makers: Levi Strauss, Lee,

Wrangler

Big Three light bulb manufacturers: Philips, Osram,

GE Lighting

Big Three U.S. breakfast cereal makers: Post,

Kellogg’s, General Mills

Big Three U.S. retailers: Walmart, Kmart, Target  

Big Three global retailers: Walmart, Asda, Carrefour   

Big Three food retailers in the U.S.: Walmart, Kroger,

Costco

Big Three food retailers in Canada: Loblaws, Metro,

Sobeys

Big Three food retailers in Slovenia: Mercator, Spar,

Tus

Big Three U.S. food services companies:

Compass Group, Aramark, Sodexo 

Big Three chocolate manufacturers: Hershey’s, Nestle,

Cadbury’s

Big Three U.S. ice cream manufacturers: Breyers,

Edy’s/Dreyer’s, Blue Bell

Big Three U.S. fast food hamburger restaurants:

McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King

Big Three U.S. office products retailers: Staples, Office

Depot, Office Max 

Big Three e-book sellers: Amazon, Apple,

Barnes & Noble

Big Three U.S. wireless carriers: Verizon, AT&T,

Sprint Nextel

Big Three management consulting firms: BCG,

Bain & Company, McKinsey

Big Three credit rating agencies: Standard & Poor's,

Moody's, Fitch  

Big Three U.S. colleges: Harvard, Yale, Princeton 

Name #4 in any category above.  Some are hard to imagine.  A business manager or owner knows his or her business must be perceived as one of the three biggest or best or cheapest.  The categories depend on market segmentation, and market segmentation depends on different perceptions of the company, organization, product or service.  “History shows that the first brand into the brain, on the average, gets twice the long-term market share of the No. 2 brand and twice again as much as the No. 3 brand.  And the relationships are not easily changed.  The leader brand in category after category outsells the number two brand by a wide margin….Many marketing experts overlook the enormous advantages of being first.”

from Threes, Chapter 8, “Threes in Business and Technology”