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If only things were so simple as suggested by the 60 year old textbooks! Supermarket chains are heavily consolidated because they can use a high margin on unne

If only things were so simple as suggested by the 60 year old textbooks! Supermarket chains are heavily consolidated because they can use a high margin on unnecessary luxuries like packaged foods and off-season produce to undercut local grocers who had otherwise been profitable selling seasonal produce and regional meat. “But clearly, consumers end up ahead if the necessities are cheaper at the supermarket!” you say. But of course, with a supermarket organized to maximize profit rather than contribute to a community, they do everything they can to empty the consumers wallet. The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise. Then, instead of the money folding back back into the local community and local farmers/ranchers, it goes to investors at Nestle and Mars and to industrial farming operations in some distant hemisphere. Given the importance of food and it’s affordability, everything about highly consolidated supermarkets is bad. Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism!

pdonis 3y ago
> The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise. If only things were so black and white as suggested by your rhetoric. A consumer who buys the same things as they were buying before, just at cheaper prices, is better off, even by your criteria. Nobody holds a gun to people's heads and forces them to buy "unnecessary luxuries". A consumer who chooses to spend additional money on what you are pleased to call "unnecessary luxuries" that they could not buy at all before, because nobody was selling them, is also better off--not by your gerrymandered criterion, but by the standard criterion of economists, from those "60 year old textbooks" to today: they have options they didn't have before, and they are choosing to exercise those options. That is what "wealth" is--people having more choices. > Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism! I said "free market", not capitalism. They're not the same thing. Large supermarket chains happen to be an example of both, but not all examples work out that way. In fact, even the large supermarket chain example is not completely a free market example, because the government messes with food prices by subsidizing particular food crops in order to favor large agribusinesses over small farmers. To the extent that helped to enable large supermarket chains to undercut local grocery stores, that is an illustration of capitalism being against free markets.

pdonis 3y ago

> The consumer spends more overall because they are coaxed into buying the luxuries that they wouldn’t have cared much about otherwise. If only things were so black and white as suggested by your rhetoric. A consumer who buys the same things as they were buying before, just at cheaper prices, is better off, even by your criteria. Nobody holds a gun to people's heads and forces them to buy "unnecessary luxuries". A consumer who chooses to spend additional money on what you are pleased to call "unnecessary luxuries" that they could not buy at all before, because nobody was selling them, is also better off--not by your gerrymandered criterion, but by the standard criterion of economists, from those "60 year old textbooks" to today: they have options they didn't have before, and they are choosing to exercise those options. That is what "wealth" is--people having more choices. > Supermarkets are not a good example if you’re trying to champion capitalism! I said "free market", not capitalism. They're not the same thing. Large supermarket chains happen to be an example of both, but not all examples work out that way. In fact, even the large supermarket chain example is not completely a free market example, because the government messes with food prices by subsidizing particular food crops in order to favor large agribusinesses over small farmers. To the extent that helped to enable large supermarket chains to undercut local grocery stores, that is an illustration of capitalism being against free markets.