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>Operating a commissary in a prison is more complex than a local convenience store Why so? Here they just got a few pallets of normal grocery store stuff and m
by ryanlol 10y ago
>Operating a commissary in a prison is more complex than a local convenience store
Why so? Here they just got a few pallets of normal grocery store stuff and mostly used inmate labor to run it.
Really simple and costs essentially nothing to operate, especially since they don't have to be open every day.
The only complexity comes from potentially transporting the inmates to the commissary, but that's not a particularly efficient way to do it when you can just give inmates paper "menus" where they can just fill in their orders and have them brought to their cell blocks.
- bluejekyll 10y agoThe reason (the only reasonable one o can come up with) is the added cost of inspection before selling them. I don't disagree that the mark up mentioned in the post was extreme, but I don't have a good idea of what it would be otherwise. Based on my having visited places with high tariffs, or a difficult place to deliver things (top of a mountain) you definitely see large markups. Not 6x, but 2x-3x isn't uncommon.
- marcusgarvey 10y ago> the added cost of inspection before selling them. I wouldn't expect the supplier to bear this cost; it's the jailers who are doing the inspecting.
- ryanlol 10y ago> or a difficult place to deliver things (top of a mountain) you definitely see large markups. Not 6x, but 2x-3x isn't uncommon. But surely they aren't charging 2x-3x more because they need to make profit, but because it's justifiable for them to charge 2x-3x more (mostly due to lack of competition). However, profiting from prisoners by exploiting artificially restricted competition seems rather unethical to me.