That's true. The farmers' market also acts as a advertising for that kind of direct relationship. Most of the vendors have cards with links or phone numbers where you can arrange that kind of thing, or even deliveries. I'd say the difference is the farmers' market allows for that, whereas at a grocery store I'm usually buying products labelled states away, if they even are from a farmer you could ever buy direct from at all.

> "...like driving to Joel Salatin's Polyface Farms and buying broiler chickens directly from him."

reading omnivore's dilemma when it came out impulsively made me want to do that, but of course the impracticality of that quickly dawned on me. it's similarly why reading a book is a better than going and getting first-hand accounts for all our information. we've created socioeconomic structures for very good reasons, so we shouldn't want to burn them down for the tradeoffs, but rather we should address the negatives directly.

We get about 2/3rds of our produce from a CSA (community-supported agriculture) share each week. The farmer drops off a load of whatever's ready to eat that week, and the members show up and take home their portion of what's there.

From a "commercial marketplace" POV, it's basically a farce. There's no security -- it's literally just a folding table full of food on someone's porch with a clipboard to mark that you've taken your share for the week -- and the supply varies with the weather, crop conditions, and even mundane things like "the delivery truck broke down this week; shares will be small and/or late."

And yet: everyone gets fed, the farmer gets paid, and it all ends up being price-competitive with a grocery store (much less a farmer's market).

We also patronize a farmer's market for the "showcase" products that succeed there: big pretty loaves of bread, flats of fruit, etc. It's still cheaper than any high-end grocery store, the shelf life is amazing b/c it hasn't traveled 1000 miles on a truck, and we get to interact directly with the folks who make the food.

The catch -- and it's a big one, in terms of classic microeconomic indicators -- is that we can't get an arbitrary amount of any chosen good at a competitive price right on the spot. Want peaches, but the stall sold out or bugs got this week's share? Sorry; hope cherries are okay this week. Don't like turnips or beets? Well, you might need to trade with someone who does, or find a new way to prepare 'em.

There's also no "economy of scale" to speak of; the largest vendors are probably a couple of bakers who make O(thousands) of loaves per day, or the ranchers and fishermen who show up with coolers full of frozen steaks and fillets (b/c one cow or fishing boat load actually feeds a lot of people).

Oh, and basically every farmer's market is also a localized barter economy. If you watch you can see the vendors roaming between stalls, offering trades and samples with other purveyors. After-hours, there are a _lot_ of boxes of food moving from one stall to another just before the left-overs get loaded back into the truck.

So yes, strictly speaking these are all "marketplaces". It's a far cry though from Amazon swooping in to undercut the successful products on their own platform, or any major store chain selling shelf space to the highest bidder to create -- rather than respond to -- consumer demand.

Obviously it doesn't work for every product or service, but there's definitely a space to accept a little less efficiency in favor of community-level resilience.

As a sales mechanism for CSA boxes they aren't too bad

The efficiency is dependent on what you're measuring - food per land area? Food per energy input? Energy output per energy input?

I never said they weren't. The takeaway would be middlemen can add different value. In this case the middleman is adding value by opening the door to direct relationships. So it's a gateway. In the case of a supermarket, they're adding something like distribution or logistics.

Your comment is phrased as if you disagree with a conclusion which I don't believe was posed in the GP.

It turns out manufacturing and distribution aren't the same business (food is a perfect example, there are used to be multiple layers of wholesalers, supermarkets took that all away...if you take them away, you get the layers of wholesalers...I will also say, farmer's markets aren't as clean, no-one today knows how unclean food used to be before supermarkets but that is another major reason why they exist).

You would have thought that a former policymaker/lobbyist would have known better than the market...he went to Harvard you known. But it turns out that there is a reason why businesses have been organized this way for the past three centuries.

Somehow people expect to buy straight from the farmers at the farmers market located in the downtown of a large city, ignoring the fact that the farmers do need to.. farm their land. Traveling with their goods back and forth within the city isn't really an efficient use of their time.