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Comment by throwawaysleep | Hacker News Reader

> to help keep small businesses alive.

That’s what a lot of this concern is really about. Legal bailouts for mediocre boomers who run inefficient, unambitious businesses with high prices.

Small businesses try to guilt you for your business as they rarely offer something worth buying on the merits unless they occupy a niche.

> Walmart and scattered Dollar Generals fill the void left by shuttered independent grocers. Frerick worries about the mid-level grocers “collaps[ing] like the rest of America.”

“Independent” in this case meaning high priced grocers people didn’t want to shop at. They got wiped out for being unable to control their costs.

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Walmart and drug store retail “control their costs” by using their market power to shift them up-chain. Their suppliers are required to stock and rotate inventory (as opposed to the retail employees). Unsold and expired product is required to be bought back by suppliers. If a retail buyer finds out a supplier has extra funds they will call and require that the supplier buy advertising on their homegrown retail media network (a shakedown). It’s a racket

Nature presents the efficiency vs security dilemma almost everywhere you look. One is always traded off for the other, especially between the short term and long term.

Efficiency lowers costs (especially in the short term), but increases risks in the long term (less resiliency/options when things go wrong). Things going wrong can also mean a business with pricing power deciding to increase profit margins (and/or reduce quality/quantity of services).

Walmart is notorious for coming into an area and running at a loss until it has eliminated all the competition then jacking up prices.

Is that true? Or does it just seem that way because it takes time for places to go out of business competing with Walmart and during that time we have inflation. Is it proven that Walmart operates at a loss for some of their stores for a while?

Is this true? It definitely sounds truthy and would confirm my biases. But I could just as well see:

1. Walmart opens location

2. Prices things to get a small margin

3. Competition is driven out because consumers don't want to go to multiple stores to get everything they need

4. Suppliers raise costs, inflation happens, market conditions change, etc. (it would even make sense for the supplier to raise prices if they have less independent customers, to account for the risk of only having 1 big customer)

5. Someone writes an article about how X is more expensive now at Walmart than it was at random shop, years ago.

> “Independent” in this case meaning high priced grocers people didn’t want to shop at.

Not necessarily high-priced. Expense to the consumer (me) is also measured in time.

Maybe the little stores didn't have a large selection, so a shopper who went there would have to go to the big store anyway. Why waste time? Just go to the big one. I'm guilty of that behavior.

Flip that story a bit and I've also bought more expensive individual items at a small store close to me when it was "an emergency." Higher prices were outweighed by my time saved.

> occupy a niche

The indies that seem to exist in most of the country seem to be ethnic specialty markets or local produce/meat/etc. Near me in my little Iowa town are Korean, Mexican, and Egyptian grocers, fruit/veggie produce, and butcher shops. There's also the pretentious Co-op. I should add that the farmer's market is always bustling and also isn't being put out of business by the Walmart.

And this is flyover country. It's not like when I was in Manhattan and within a block of me had 2 bodegas, 2 bakeries, a seafood store, a cheese shop, and a butcher.

I'm sure I've left things off both of those lists.

> Legal bailouts for mediocre boomers who run inefficient, unambitious businesses with high prices

No, they're for things deemed to be for the public good despite the ravages of the "free market," by which today we mean acceptable monopolies.

>That’s what a lot of this concern is really about. Legal bailouts for mediocre boomers who run inefficient, unambitious businesses with high prices.

The free market only works when both consumers and producers are atomised and unable to exert market influence. Both billionaires, unions, conglomerates, vertical integration and every other trick labor or capital uses to increase their bargaining power are market failures.

In short: if you like capitalism you need trust busting along with union busting.

Certainly a take.

That's the definition of a free market in every economics textbook.

It's actually the opposite of what free market means in economics textbooks. The textbook definition of a free market is an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses. Monopoly busting and union busting are both government interventions that are explicitly not supposed to happen in a free market.

Indeed, do we shop for groceries in order to provide businesses with revenue, or does a business exist to serve customers? If the latter, and some business don't serve our needs as well (e.g. higher prices, poor selection or bad service), then should we not be able to patronize businesses that do?

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