You’re the absolutist bro. A reasonable, sustainable profit for all while reasonably treating the environment and workers is good and not that is bad. Costco, WalMart and Amazon are not that. You’re the one who walked into a Costco discussion and said that everyone who thinks Costco is bad thinks all markets are bad, poor people should not have socks, and next thing you know the libruls are going to start moving people into population reduction centers.
HMOs have been Costco-ing healthcare providers for the past 25 years.
They slashed reimbursements while offering only mildly better premiums…keeping the spread for themselves while forcing providers to spend more worker hours just dealing with all of bullshit just to get paid.
This is a lot to draw from vendors/Costco haggling over at best, a handful of points on the margins for the vast majority of cases.
Jalfrezi assuming that the vendors getting a few extra points on their end will go to higher wages and transform areas seems like a gigantic leap.
I don’t know what your experience is, but we actually have someone itt who has a lot of real world experience with vendor relationships to Costco.
It is bizarre how the free market fundamentalists always rush to the defense of monoplistic businesses.
The advantage that Costco, Amazon and WalMart have is that they have an inordinate control over markets. That’s not free market capitalism!
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trickle down MIGHT be true, therefore we should rework the economy on the assumption that it is absolutely 100% true
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the solution to that is to tax the fuck out of them, not to micromanage the “correct” level of haggling they do with their suppliers
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Or you could not shop there.
ah yes it’s amazing that someone who is a supplier thinks suppliers should just automatically make more money
or that! yes, go ahead and knit your own socks, that’s cool too.
If vendors got 100% of their demands in every interaction with bigger businesses, none of your problems would have changed!
You’ve accused pvn of arguing in bad faith, but are doing the exact same thing.
There’s probably no one on this site more in-good-faith than Johnny. If you want to cast aspersions at him, it just makes you look bad.
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I’m not casting aspersions, I’m just saying that it’s not surprising that someone who is selling stuff to costco wishes that costco paid more for whatever it was that he was selling.
Ok. I know you know there are other options, and would allow for that. My point is that you don’t have to go:
A: Costco sucks
PVN: What do you want, a government take over? That’s totalitarianism!
Come on man, you can’t accuse him of bad faith posting then make posts like this.
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I don’t think that’s true. I think Costco almost always winning happens because of their control of markets. That’s their competitive advantage. The result is they drive competition that doesn’t have the power to crush vendors out of business.
Some context for those reading
The episode is discussing a Matt Yglesias book entitled “one billion americans” a book that suggests America has lost its sense of purpose and that increasing our population density to that of other countries would renew such a thing.
Yglesias is getting rightfully clowned because his plan to get to 1 billion hinges on things like, basic socdem proposals that would enable more families to thrive, like basic child care. Why not just implement such things without some weird call 600 million more people?
Alex has a history on this forum of distorting things that come from other sections of the internet, especially internet comments from the left. So take anything he says here with a giant grain of salt. "
Leading on “Immigration is bad for the environment” as a summary is completely false and completely what I would expect from a garbage neolib that thinks that the 15 million dollars Elizabeth Warren took from Karla Jurvetson was actually serving democracy and the working class.
Pretty pathetic stuff. I’m sure Alex actually paid the $5 to listen to this on their Patreon and isn’t dishonestly cribbing from neolib twitter, as he has done in the past
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But Costco or any retailer squeezing businesses that make the goods that they sell is such a tiny slice of that whole picture, and drawing a line from there to increased environmental destruction is hamfisted, in that we can do the same thing no matter how the Costco-vendor negotiations play out.
- Costco successfully squeezes vendor, lowering the cost of goods. This leads to more consumer consumption from Costco’s customers, and more environmental destruction
- Costco pays more to the vendor, meaning the vendor’s owner and/or shareholders now have higher profits, which leads them to consume more, and thus increased environmental destruction
- Costco pays the vendor more, and the benevolent vendor passes the spoils onto the employees, who are now richer and can consume more, thus more environmental destruction.
So I guess the right answer is to just pile all the wealth onto a singular winning individual who can’t possibly consume its value while everyone else is now restricted to consuming bare subsistence. Paradise. I know that’s not what you think, but it sure seems odd to be afraid of lower costs for consumer goods at the expense of some business’s profit margin. Cheaper consumer goods are not a straight line towards ending poverty, because things like rent, health care, and such are larger parts of a poor family’s budget than consumer goods, but cheaper goods are not in and of themselves bad, and it doesn’t seem appreciably better to pad the profit margins of various producers of consumer goods at the expense of the consumers thereof.
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Surely this is your argument #1 in favour of capitalism ie that more profitable companies will pay higher wages and be better places to work, raising these standards across the sector?
You’re the one who has to believe this is true for your libertarian arguments to hold water; I’m the one who’s allowed to question whether it happens much in practice, hence the word “potential”.