4 ms·

That's very interesting. It makes me wonder if there are any good free market ways of promoting the over-building of crucial infrastructural services

Agathos 9y ago
There's one. Depending on who you ask, it's called surge pricing or price gouging.
cjsawyer 9y ago
I’d imagine there is no way to physically be ready to handle a sudden intense uptick in demand without seriously undermining the everyday allocation efficiency of things like storage space and production equipment. In an industry like shipping that goes doubly so because their main assets are sorting facilities and vehicles. If the plants/fleets are 10x as big as they need to be for 99% of the year it’s probably economically better to just deal with the crunch for that last 1% of the year rather than own too much infrastructure.
geofft 9y ago
Depending on how extreme you want to take the concept of "free market," offer incentives to groups of people to celebrate meaningful cultural holidays on different days. Pay the Greek Orthodox to switch back to the Julian calendar for Christmas (so they'd celebrate on January 7 on the Gregorian calendar), market Kwanzaa like crazy, rebrand the feast of St. Nicholas (December 6) as Santa Claus Day and make a cultural norm of gift-giving then instead of on Christmas, etc. Honestly, even though I care a lot about attending church services for Christmas, I have never really cared about visiting family and friends on Christmas specifically - it's just logistically complicated and expensive and falls at a stressful time of the year. If you gave me a way to go fly to visit my family on some cheaper day and have it count for the same cultural expectation, I would very enthusiastically take it.
- usrusr 9y ago
  Employees might actually prefer one week of unbounded craziness with a clear end over a whole procession holiday weeks. And with free market doing its thing, in the end you would just see postage ever so slightly cheaper.
majormajor 9y ago
"Over-building" here looks like US sprawl in new development areas of the past few decades: huge parking minimums, huge number of road lanes, and all that other stuff that makes this sort of thing not a problem, but is just inefficient waste 99% of the time.
PeterisP 9y ago
The free market way that the costs (assuming they're significant) would be properly reflected in prices and cause some of the people to shift their purchasing/deliveries/whatever to another time. Currently, there's no meaningful economic pressure to do your christmas shopping months in advance; so that's probably an indicator that the infrastructure is manageable and no major changes are really needed.
- bitmage 9y ago
  There is a negative incentive as well. Most return policies are thirty days, so if you shop months early you have no recourse should a gift be found to be defective at Christmas.

Agathos 9y ago

There's one. Depending on who you ask, it's called surge pricing or price gouging.

cjsawyer 9y ago

I’d imagine there is no way to physically be ready to handle a sudden intense uptick in demand without seriously undermining the everyday allocation efficiency of things like storage space and production equipment. In an industry like shipping that goes doubly so because their main assets are sorting facilities and vehicles. If the plants/fleets are 10x as big as they need to be for 99% of the year it’s probably economically better to just deal with the crunch for that last 1% of the year rather than own too much infrastructure.

geofft 9y ago

Depending on how extreme you want to take the concept of "free market," offer incentives to groups of people to celebrate meaningful cultural holidays on different days. Pay the Greek Orthodox to switch back to the Julian calendar for Christmas (so they'd celebrate on January 7 on the Gregorian calendar), market Kwanzaa like crazy, rebrand the feast of St. Nicholas (December 6) as Santa Claus Day and make a cultural norm of gift-giving then instead of on Christmas, etc. Honestly, even though I care a lot about attending church services for Christmas, I have never really cared about visiting family and friends on Christmas specifically - it's just logistically complicated and expensive and falls at a stressful time of the year. If you gave me a way to go fly to visit my family on some cheaper day and have it count for the same cultural expectation, I would very enthusiastically take it.

usrusr 9y ago
Employees might actually prefer one week of unbounded craziness with a clear end over a whole procession holiday weeks. And with free market doing its thing, in the end you would just see postage ever so slightly cheaper.

majormajor 9y ago

"Over-building" here looks like US sprawl in new development areas of the past few decades: huge parking minimums, huge number of road lanes, and all that other stuff that makes this sort of thing not a problem, but is just inefficient waste 99% of the time.

PeterisP 9y ago

The free market way that the costs (assuming they're significant) would be properly reflected in prices and cause some of the people to shift their purchasing/deliveries/whatever to another time. Currently, there's no meaningful economic pressure to do your christmas shopping months in advance; so that's probably an indicator that the infrastructure is manageable and no major changes are really needed.

bitmage 9y ago
There is a negative incentive as well. Most return policies are thirty days, so if you shop months early you have no recourse should a gift be found to be defective at Christmas.