I spend a good four months every year in Poland and Austria, and there’s really nowhere in the world except China that offers consumers as much choice and availability as the U.S. does.
Meanwhile in Europe I spend many evening on internet forums and Facebook groups doing research trying to find a part that will work with my car, then finding someone willing to sell it and finally using Google Translate getting someone to ship it to my foreign (to them) country. I even had to resort to proxies just to get car parts from Eastern to Western Europe.
They're not mutually exclusive, two things can be had at the same time.
Wish to live in your reality tho, where I can buy a dozen different brands of hot dogs while visiting the doctor for elevated blood pressure without needing to take out a payment plan on klarna.
The ease of buying things that the prior poster referred to is basically just three things:
- A massive common market with few to no internal trade barriers/complications. The EU is still nowhere near as integrated and has all sorts of odd hidden complications to actually moving + selling things.
- Hell, just this week I've seen that one of the indie record labels I pay attention to will no longer sell merch within the EU other than to the country they're based in, because the new EU packaging regulations make it infeasibly expensive to comply with for every country for the small volumes they move.
- A common language that ~92% of the population speak fluently.
- Relatively efficient logistics.
None of this has anything to do with "dismantling the welfare state" and has only a little to do with differences in workers rights/benefits - giving delivery workers in the US better wages/job security would not make the "Amazon" logistics model infeasible.
This is true, although I find it interesting that so many people then gravitate to Costco, where consumer choice in a given category is deliberately restricted to one or two product variations selected by the head office.
Also, you don't have to shop at Costco exclusively, you still have all the other options available. Costco is just a good default if you're not looking for something specific.