Supply chain resilience is incredibly expensive insurance for very rare and relatively short term disruptive events. Covid for instance is going to put things out of whack for two or three years, but is preventing that worth paying up for the redundancy and contingency plans over the previous 100 years?
Probably not. Over the long term, efficiency wins out.
This is actually not true. As a consumer my choices are constrained by retailers and suppliers (and government due to regulations). They choose based on price what to offer. If all retailers in my area don't want to supply organic food, I can't buy it.
So I have limited power to alter the market. For extremely bad options, there's the choice not to buy, but for necessities, that option is precluded.
Which is why a healthcare "free market" (hint: it's anything but free right now) is a chimera: when you or your family is dying or suffering, you are willing to pay "value based pricing".
The real solution is to delink the "global" supply chain and build up local options. Resilience also increases jobs and tax base, but reduces megacorp profits. Since we actually live in an oligarchy, profits are all that are chased.
Or perhaps unrestrained capitalism will always result in these conditions?
It's like the opposite mistake that communists make. They expect a single centralized decision maker to balance all considerations to set a price, which is inevitably ineffective.
This vote with your dollar argument expects every individual to balance all considerations to set their own personal price. There is an assumption of information symmetry and unlimited ability to analyze on the part of the individuals behind the vote with your feet argument that is just not remotely true.
Of course, reality doesn't check out that way and the record shows it. This doesn't stop people from getting upset should you imply that they are not equipped to sensibly make their own decisions.
We are strongly encouraged to make terrible decisions all the time, and there's a lot of money behind it, from many actors.
But the rest of the reality is that you need to consider the relationship. Buying from a local-owned store doesn't really count if you're just doing a transaction and walking away. I didn't feel like discussing the drink quality, or asking for a refund, would have been appreciated, so I stopped going there. Local stores that you can't develop a relationship with might as well be megachains. Local stores that you don't WANT to develop a relationship with, making yourself a little vulnerable in the process, are another matter. America didn't just want cheap and/or consistent goods, they didn't want to have to interact with the people they were buying them from. And that's the real sad part.
You are hand-waving that delinking from global supply chains somehow magically fixes the issue (I don’t see how it’s relevant to the Southwest article) and that it only reduces megacorp profits.
Local doesn’t mean resilient. Local options must have their entire supply chain local in order to be maximally resilient. But now you are talking about removing a fundamental feature of capitalism: comparative advantage.
It is 100x more expensive to run a labor-based factory on the San Francisco peninsula than it is in the cheaper parts of East Asia. Cost of living, local talent, building and labor codes, etc all vary and contribute to costs. When a widget is made in SFBA for 50x the cost of the same widget with comparable quality elsewhere in the world, the risk of those one-in-a-century events means that the consumer is paying 10x more for most of their costs for the 99/100 years they don’t need the risk mitigation.
Also, your plan to delink cuts across the de facto way things work, so now you have to invent a way to convince Americans to pay 10x more for some obscure risk issue they will have forgotten about in 4 years. Are you adding massive import taxes/tariffs, outlawing imports, or do you just expect voluntary compliance?
Not really, no. We can probably count on more resilient products being more expensive, but we can't count on more expensive products being more resilient. It doesn't work that way. There is really no way for an average consumer to know which expensive products are expensive because they are sold by resilient companies, and which are expensive for innumerable other reasons. Most purchases are made by people who lack the knowledge, experience or training that would be required to evaluate the resilience of a business.
Voting for something without knowledge about that something is farcical. Ultimately this "voting" is little more than rhetoric used to push the blame onto those with the least insight into how the system works.
How would you have me judge them? I don't know anything about how to run an airline and I wouldn't even know where to start if you asked me to look up which of the two had a more resilient business model. You can't really expect any random air traveler to have an opinion on airlines better informed than their personal experiences. I think most people would struggle to tell you something so basic as what sort of plane they were even sitting in.