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The role of the customer in the market is to choose the best quality for the lowest price.

If you take anything else into consideration you are a bad customer that damages the market.

A coffee shop is more than just the coffee though. There are other considerations to be made such as location and the environment. I'm not sure you can really be a "bad customer". The customer wants whatever they want.

Market is an optimization algorithm. It's useful function is to determine what should we make, how much and who should get it. It's not optimization algorithm for everything, just goods and services. It doesn't really work for anything else. It can't solve societal and environmental concerns. Those should be address by other tools. Trying to use market for solving them fails and results in worse market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com