I'm not a huge fan of moralistic takes on business. If you're selling something dangerous then that's wrong, but it's very easy to be blinkered from a high position.
If people want to buy food in a certain way I can't really blame them - arguably the same with Uber and taxis, Uber has disrupted an industry which was fairly uncompetitive and politically charged (Their prevalence indicates the customers appreciate their presence in the space)
Focusing solely on consumers ignores negative externalities. There are many situations in which cost benefits from such externalities (slavery, pollution, human rights abuses, animal mistreatment) can lead to a favorable marketplace position vs competitors who do not exploit such externalities.
What is more, many of these exploits (slavery, pollution, human rights abuses, animal mistreatment) were or are legal at the time such exploitation occurred. Therefore using legality as sole criterion of propriety is insufficient. A moralistic/ethical take on business is, far from a negative thing, highly necessary.
What a product should cost depends on how much people are willing to pay for it. Whether a product should be allowed to exist depends on whether it's morally acceptable.
The issue with slaves, and products that pollute the environment or mistreat living things isn't how much they cost - it's that they exist at all.
I don't think the two are so easily separable. If you take for example, "a dozen eggs", most people would consider that an acceptable product. But if you said "a dozen eggs for ten cents", for those to be legitimate eggs, they must be stolen. If you could somehow inspect them and guarantee they were legitimate, I am sure plenty of people would accept those stolen eggs at that price, but their willingness to pay for it doesn't mean the existence of a market for "a dozen eggs for ten cents" is moral.
I'm reminded of how people would express outrage over products made in a low wage country being defective or toxic, and sometimes a response would be "well, people who demand ultra-cheap products deserve what they get". That's a denial of the fraudulent aspect of such a transaction, and the inability of the consumer to solve it.
If consumers lack the moral conciousness on their day to day transactions, then how can we expect them to make the right moral choices when they vote?
There have in fact been successful consumer-led movements, but the most successful of these concern cases where the consumers also happened to be the same people being exploited (colonial India's rejection of dumped British textiles, the Montgomery bus boycott, the Boston tea party, etc).
Cases where consumers have acted en masse on behalf of another exploited class are a lot fewer and weaker. To some extent, one may point to the current growth of organic animal products as an example of this, but even in this case, this has been boosted by consumers seeing these choices (in some cases rightly, in some wrongly) as also healthier for human end consumers besides the question of animal cruelty.
History's guide suggests that while morally-minded consumers can and should vote with their wallets, such personal virtuous choices are largely useless without a larger movement to effect change.
And if history suggests that people's virtuous choices are largely useless, then how is their voting going to be any better?
A more topical one might be if you disagree with a company using sweatshop labor. Figuring out which companies engage in sweatshop labor and avoiding them is a remarkably difficult task, not in the least because companies do whatever they can in order to hide said actions. And even if you do manage to create a list of good/bad companies, there's no guarantee that you can purchase solely from the good companies without having to go through some other morally dubious medium such as Amazon.
The idea of shopping based on your moral conscious might've worked 50 years ago when the supply chain was far smaller, but nowadays it's so complex as to be almost unfathomable for one user to shop their moral compass without touching at least one thing they disagree with.
With regards to the sweatshop labor: if you care not to buy sweatshop clothes and you can't reasonably establish the origins of the clothes, then don't buy them. Only stick with manufacturers who have had their products verified by a trusted third party.
It's also overly reductive and ignores things like voter suppression, extralegal affairs and abusing the court system.
For your second argument, you seemed to ignore my original point which is that it's generally impossible to actually establish the origin of said clothing due to the complex supply chain behind the scenes. Even if it's a trusted third party, that clothing is still being delivered via companies that deliver sweatshop clothing and sold in stores which sell sweatshop clothing. At a certain point some percentage of what you pay will go to support said sweatshops whether directly or indirectly, so how can you expect a consumer to operate in a full moralistic behavior when all of their actions are losses? At that point the only winning move is to not play, which is also not possible because, well, Capitalism.
Given how many people actually don't even bother to vote, I doubt voter suppression is the problem. It seems like an issue of implementation and limitation of the current political system. In contrast, "voter" turnout by consumers is 100%. Every product you buy is a vote you cast.
With regards to tracing the origins of a product: you're trying to fix a problem that's even worse with government. If you're so concerned that you aren't able to identify the origins of a product with 100% certainty, then we ought to compare it with the baseline: what is the trust factor with government? At any rate, the traceability of a product can get as accurate as you want it to be... so long as you pay enough money to establish it. If you want, you can be flown to every part of the world and you can personally ensure that every fiber of your clothes is not coming from a sweatshop. Of course, that would be insanely expensive, but it is possible. 99.99999999999% of consumers don't want that much transparency.
right, so if you get pizza delivery, you're probably Hitler running Deep Horizon. What a nice way to argue your point.
As for pollution, if that's immoral, then so is going to the restaurant to eat itself as well as driving in general.
Not counting of course the fact that in certain regions of the world, if they don't do that they'll starve to death.
And human rights abuse? I had a job delivering, and it was honestly one of my favorite jobs. The pay wasn't great but just cruising around listening to music all night was awesome.
then "humans right abuse is somehow related to delivery but I won't specify how"
then I replied "I was a deliverer and it was a fine job"
Of the three arguments mine is most relevant.
Maybe you can explain how subway delivery involves human rights abuse.
In cases where the free market isn't incentivized to make the supplies we need, it's the job of the government to take over and make them. "Profiting from catastrophe" as you put it will result in price gouging.
And how that usually works is that the government offers to pay a very high price to someone willing to doing so.
This isn't all that different as the government then pays 5x for the item.
But yes, this certainly could be true.
Definitely possible but I'm not sure it's happening specifically at the moment.
If home toilet paper demand will only be high for 2 years you can't make money.
You also want prices to increase to discourage hoarding. Otherwise what happens is that people with disposable income just strip the shelves because there is no possible downside to hoarding toilet paper. They can just not buy it later with no loss to themselves if the price is the same.
So, raising the price on TP does nothing to increase supply in a 1 month time frame and reduces availability to the poorest. Instead, reduce demand with a bidet and limit customer purchases.
If you have some plants that are not at capacity, you can hire additional shifts to produce more, run on weekends, etc. Then you have additional labor costs, overtime, materials costs, etc. to recoup.
The manufacturing plant I once worked for had spare capacity for the better part of a decade, so it's not some completely unusual thing and was in fact part of our corporate strategy at the time to gain market share.
A new shift will take a while to train up and temps are... ugh... don't even get me started about the sort of people temp agencies send. We had some that only lasted a day for not listening and doing stupidly unsafe things. One of them nearly hit me upside the head with a piece of glass because he wasn't paying attention to where he was swinging it. That was his last day on the job, for precisely that reason.
What is the ideal pricing to achieve long term goals wasn't something I was addressing.
If anything it's the opposite.
Not every plant is run at a constant 24x7 three shift schedule. There are plenty of businesses that keep some slack in their manufacturing to respond to changes in demand as part of their corporate strategy, especially if they think there's an opportunity to gain market share.
But in my experience, there's usually some slack. Maybe not enough to pick up all the demand, but there's some. Maybe they have three shifts but don't work weekends or such. Then they can have people pulling lots of overtime.
Raw materials are usually well-stocked in advance. There is a limit on how much demand can spike before there are issues, of course, but some industries may have weeks or months worth of raw materials stocked. This is going to be highly variable by industry, though. Something like raw glass is nothing like stocking chickens for processing.
For TP I'd guess that they can stock a lot of raw materials, though. It's not made from anything that's going to go bad on them, so they probably stock up a lot based on whatever is cheapest.
How can one make such a vast claim without knowing things such as cost of input materials, machinery, labor, etc?
PS: And yea it’s more complex than that, you can generally skip out in advertising but may be paying significant overtime etc. But that’s rarely particularly important as there are so many inputs involved in ramping up production that you hit multiple different limits.
People in short supply also don’t just work additional hours for double pay. An hour of my leisure time is worth far more than double.
Further, just as the US abandoned domestically made masks after the H1N1 epidemic, and went back to inexpensive overseas versions -- they may do it again with PPE. So you also need to cover the costs for quite-possibly a factory you are building that might stop operating in a year or two.
Perhaps so, but if that were the case, the producer wouldn't be fairly accused of profiteering. Usually these accusations arise when the production or acquisition cost for the seller is low and the sale price is very high.
Talking about buying your own health insurance is taboo amongst some in the UK, even though it reduces pressure on the (I should "our") NHS, because to them it's immoral to have capitalism in healthcare or something like that
For example in Japan there is no tipping and trying to do so will be considered very rude. The restaurant and its staff are professionals, they have set a price and you are paying it. They dont expect a tip for doing a good job as they simply strive to do a good job each and every time they serve guests.
Some people care about both.
If I wanted premium service and a premium seat, I can pay the premium price for business or first class, or fly on a better airline. Even though people complain about the terribly small seats and lack of service on budget airlines and economy tickets, they still choose the lowest seat price above anything else. And the cost of plane tickets has fallen drastically over the past few decades so it's not like the same product is more expensive, people just want cheap flights.
Appreciated their presence in the space or appreciated that some VC bozos were handing out huge discounts on taxi rides?
Capitalist enterprises are neither immoral (left) nor moral (right). They just happen to be the most efficient - read easy to cobble together. It does not mean they are the best outcome for society.
I don't like the societal purpose questioning because people forget that not everyone has a lot of money to spend - the trade-off will almost definitely be between "ethics" and the cost to the person on the street.
I don't buy my books from Amazon because I love Amazon, I do it because it's the cheapest option and I know it'll work. If you want to spend a bit more and support a local book company that's up to you but Amazon is undoubtedly a better experience than any other company I've seen (Specifically for relatively niche technical books, if it was a fiction book it's basically the same).
^ that isn't to say Amazon should he left to monopolize as they please, just that the nuance is easily missed.
This is not a debate about the merits of capitalism vs. socialism (or communism).
This is simply saying that some free-market solutions lead to worse outcomes for society. My hoped-for solution was a co-op model app which is completely in the free market realm.
You went ahead and made this about the inherent virtue of capitalism and choice.
I really dont know what you are saying about Amazon since you seem to be equivocating. Not letting Amazon be a monopoly is depriving their customers of choice!
as determined by who?
No, the reward is money/resources and the person wasn't implying the polar opposite of the article. You are creating a false dichotomy here by trying to split things into good or bad. There is a neutral position that you don't have to be invested in.
> Why is questioning the efficacy, for society, of the economic models of any company considered immoral?
I don't think the parent said this at all.
If someone says they don't like cauliflower, that isn't a moral judgment. You are not understanding what is being said or what it implies.
Correcting someone about is not casting a moral judgement. Saying a piece of a system meant to create and capture some value doesn't need to be ascribed good or evil is a statement that can be taken at face value. Trying to say everything is a moral judgement that someone else is creating a false dichotomy is just projection.