There are only a few companies that own nearly all brands you can find in a typical first world supermarket. Not much more than these few: Procter&Gamble, Unilever, Mars, Mondelez, Goodman Fielder, Nestle
But your point remains valid here. A small number of companies control a huge percentage of supply.
The funny thing is that they probably use the same manufacturers as the popular brands and just also a different label on it.
They absolutely do. For example, Costco has two Kirkland Signature vodkas. One of them is Grey Goose, and the other I forgot. Skyy? Same goes for their tequila, it's all Jose Cuervo.
The story goes that their biscuits are made in the same factory and cooked in the same batch as other brands, but M&S required that their biscuits be taken from the centre of the tray where they were cooked in the oven more evenly.
Depending on the store you get either mostly only store products (Aldi, Lidl), both store products and brand products (Kaufland, Rewe?) or mostly brand products (likely Edeka)
The case of what you mentioned is the reason why the Schwarz Group (Lidl and Kaufland) are moving overseas, respectively to the US and to Australia: there isn't much price competition.
Disclaimer: work for them.
https://crueltyfreeblog.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/foodmap....
I feel this is something like identity politics, and something that really does not need regulation except to allow those to identify however they wish, with no determent to others.
Corporations are made up of people, yes, but giving them personhood is a pretty dangerous idea. Should they get to vote? Obviously, the answer has to be "no" or else people will register companies to rig elections.
If they can't vote, are they really people?
If they aren't, then what exactly are felons and foreigners?
This logic is hugely flawed. Since we work off of a one-person-gets-one-ballot system, grouping people together (as in a corporation) and giving them a vote wouldn't make any sense. By contrast, you can't "use up" your speech rights: Each person is allowed an unlimited amount of legal speech, and I don't think there's a compelling philosophical argument that a group of people speaking together isn't protected. There may be _pragmatic_ arguments, but that's another ballgame altogether, since the entire point of the Constitution is that it's _not_ subject to the pragmatism/whims of the time.
I'm not saying that "corporations should be legally modeled as people" is an ironclad truth, but none of your objections make sense.
In reality, the argument is that you can't restrict a corporation's speech because using a corporation to speak is merely a form or method people use to speak.
You could speak via billboards, grass roots organizations, a radio show, lettets, or even a company you own.
The government can't curtail your speech no matter the method.
The people who comprise a group have no extra vote to give: if two friends and I form a group, a new vote allocated to the three of us doesn't magically materialize. By contrast, since there is no quota for speech per person, two friends and I can form a group (eg, an advocacy group) and tomorrow go down to Union Square (or buy airtime, or hand out pamphlets, or stand on a street corner) and engage in whatever legal speech we like, collectively. The claim is that if that group of people happens to be given the structure "corporation", that doesn't automatically allow for infringing on the rights of the people within the corporation to engage in legal speech.
Again, I'm making no statement as to whether I think this approach is wise or good for society or not, but it's astonishing how common it is to see people who completely don't know what they're talking about on this issue and yet are somehow super passionate about it.
Why shouldn't a corporation, effectively a person, use the vast wealth at it's disposal to influence elections and steer government policy in the direction it wants?
Hmmm, perhaps we should rethink this whole corporations as persons thing.
Banning the use of brands obviously won't achieve anything desirable, but requiring transparent branding seems like it will improve the consumer market's spending decisions.
Of course, pro-free-market legislation will never make it through Republican-controlled Congress...
IANANC but my understanding is that a true market is two-sided: it requires informed consumers. Initiatives that bolster the buyer-side of the market aren't anti-market.
Regulations that improve market efficiency are good. Regulations that impede efficiency are bad. In practice, we do need regulations because real-world actors are not optimal rational agents.
The most basic is the enforcement of contracts, which I think everyone agrees on.
But regulations about truth in advertising fit in there too. Lists of ingredients and nutritional information on packaging are an onerous regulation that allow consumers to make better informed choices (and so lead IMO to a "better" market). (I think brand ownership transparency is close philosophically to requiring ingredients on food products.) There are many examples of regulations that promote market efficiency, which sellers don't like because they may have been making profits from the inefficiency, or from information asymmetry.
There are of course regulations which degrade market efficiency too, either by regulatory capture or ill-thought out "consumer protection" like price controls, rent control, etc.
My overall point is that the assumption that a market with the fewest controls is de-facto the "best" market should be examined closely - manipulations of the market (whether by regulation, taxes, etc.) should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis based on whether they promote or degrade market efficiency.
In this case, the information is technically available but obscured such that consumers cannot make educated purchasing decisions without expending an irrational amount of time... thereby reducing supply-side competition.
Devil's advocate...
Brands can be a mnemonic that helps customers quickly recall relative quality experienced in previous purchases. This may vary across brands, and my experiences with Dove soap don't tell me anything about my experiences with Ben and Jerry's ice cream.
Brands are often silly and misleading and I try to avoid them, but they aren't inherently malicious by default.
Any medium that can manipulate can also inform.
I have some nasty reactions to the stuff and so did my late mother, who was a total skeptic to all crunchy-granola pure-foodery. I hate that they can brand a strange chemical like this with the names of natural sweeteners and then we're expected to call it by that name. Though I admit DichlorodideoxyβDfructofuranosyl4chloro4deoxyαDgalactopyranoside is much harder to say, and contains letters that aren't even letters at all.
And, obviously, within any one local market, there will be far more better-known regional brands, often not owned by any big corporation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2018/01/craft-b...
Why would anyone buy bottled water when it comes practically free from the tap? Why would anyone buy bread that has had all the tasty goodness removed ('white bread')? Why would anyone buy branded toothpaste when the chemically-identical supermarket version is half the price? Why would anyone want roasted grain coated in sugar as the first thing you eat each day? Would anyone buy sugary water (a.k.a. pop) if they knew just how bad sugar is for them? Why would anyone want hydrogenated vegetable oil instead of butter?
Unilever can go hang.
Some reasons: immediacy, taste, convenience, quality, lack of price sensitivity.
> Why would anyone buy [prepackaged white bread]
Texture, goes stale slower than fresh baked bread, sizing, taste, convenience.
> Why would anyone buy [brand toothpaste vs store-brand toothpaste]
Taste, familiarity, trust.
Sure, bottled water tastes a little better than tap water, but I can’t help but cringe at the thought of 600 plastic bottles going into landfill. I avoid bottled water as much as possible, however when required I admit I do purchase 6 packs of 2L bottles for long road trips.
I guess it depends on where you live, but this is definitely not the case for me. And I live in a 111 year old building.
The BBC did a wonderfully subversive 3-part documentary a few years ago called "The foods that make billions", which investigates in some depth the way people's tastes have been shaped to accept anything the food industry comes up with (no matter how disgusting in concept). Well worth tracking down on YouTube or whatever (particularly the episode about yoghurt, which I found grimly hilarious).
> Taste, familiarity, trust.
That's the idea; familiarity and trust can be manufactured through advertising. You can become familiar with a brand name just by being exposed to it, and trust is harder but advertisers have it down to a science in some important ways.
You're in a place where tap water is not safe to drink and don't have a way to boil it. You live in a place where tap water is safe to drink, but tastes of sulfur. You're traveling and will want water in the next N hours. ...
Sure, there are many regions where potable water is difficult to attain, and there _are_ reasons to bottle water, but your contributions are disingenuously oblique.
Doesn't really matter, they are both manufactured and sold by the same company, at the same facility. The difference is just to provide the illusion of choice (and the price difference is usually much smaller, just enough to trigger a response in a certain common kind of consumer.)
Bottled water: Because you don't always have a tap on hand and you don't always bring a water bottle from home. Some regions doesn't have water that can be consumed directly from the tap for sanitary reasons.
Hydrogenated vegetable oil: Because of lactose intolerance, and because liquid vegetable oil wouldn't be useful in the situation.
IKR? The tub of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey is right there! And you don't have to pour the milk!
A question I often ask myself because the tap water in my house is literally the stuff they put in the bottles (mountain spring fresh etc). And yet the entire family drinks bottled water hauled at great carbon footprint via Costco, probably bottled in California which is 1200 miles away.
My best answer is that if I were to lay down the law and mandate everyone turn on the tap to get their water[1], I'd be viewed as the cook tinfoil hat Dad everyone hates.
How the water-industrial-complex arranged for that to be the state of play is a very intriguing question I think.
[1]Sometimes people prefer bottled water to tap only because they store the bottles in the fridge. Cold water to some people tastes better, but if you ran a blind test where you took their tap water, put it in bottles and chilled them, they can't tell the difference. This does not explain things in my house however because the bottles are kept at room temp.
Maybe it's just a matter of rebranding yourself as the nature-loving, environmentally-conscious Dad who wants to keep the world plastic-free for your children :-)