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The entire big box economy is a big honking subsidy to people with cars living in the suburbs by the poor, the singles, the seniors, the urban, the cyclists.
It only works because of the highways and the parking lots and the infrastructure paid for by everyone (road taxes do not cover the cost of the roads) and enjoyed by the drivers. The companies charge twice as much for small packages as big ones because they can; the purchasers without cars and access to the big boxes, the ability to drive between the Walmart and the Costco and the Price Club, don't have a choice.
Read on for Treehugger's reasons. Is bulk buying bad after all?
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Does Buying in Bulk Save Money, or is it a False Economy?
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For recreational use only.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Tuesday September 26 2017, @03:19PM (5 children)
No. Absolutely not. You're confusing success with effort. You're also ignoring inherited and gifted connections, position, wealth and power. And luck.
There are many, many people who try very hard, are absolutely standup members of society, but do not succeed due to factors well beyond their control. These people are no less worthy than someone just like them, but who becomes wealthy.
Sure, it'd be great if we could ensure that the worthy were the ones that "rose to the top" and only the unworthy failed to do so. We'd then have a metric like the one you propose where reward was sanely in proportion to success. But we can't even come close to doing that, and because we cannot do so, it is amoral – at the very least – to disadvantage those who do not do so. Likewise, it is un-sane to encourage legislators and rule makers to arrange the system to operate to formally disadvantage the less fortunate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 28 2017, @05:19AM (4 children)
If one actually looks at people who do succeed, they're usually in this category, they just choose to try again. Failure is not permanent.
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Thursday September 28 2017, @06:34PM (3 children)
Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, the number of tries notwithstanding.
Success does not indicate worthy any more than failure indicates unworthy.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 28 2017, @11:41PM (2 children)
How much is "sometimes"? I think this is a pretty mealy mouthed reply. And the number of tries does matter.
Nobody said otherwise. The people who tend to succeed on a regular basis also tend to fail on a regular basis. So IMHO if there is any sense of worthiness from risk taking, it would be in higher numbers of both successes and failures. I'm also not clear on why anyone in this thread thinks that buying in bulk is remotely relevant to risk taking. It's rather a straightforward case of planning and budgeting at the individual and small family level in order to take advantage of economies of scale.
For example, as was noted, bugs in dry goods like flour as described in the story indicates poor preservation technique (when I had that problem it was because I was just rolling up bags rather than properly sealing them in air-tight containers or ziplocks, switching to the later completely eliminated the problem) not some sort of success versus failure thing. There are certain things even an individual can buy in bulk as long as they take proper precautions. I wouldn't buy vegetables in bulk, but dry goods, frozen meat, cans, etc can keep for a long time.
My view is that it is pointless to complain that the system favors those with money or a little foresight. Instead, we should be asking, "How can I take advantage of this situation?" A lot of these services supposedly oriented towards rich people also work just fine for people who figure out how to use them and piggyback off the rich people (such as buying in bulk or trading on the stock market, to give another example).
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday September 29 2017, @05:57AM (1 child)
It varies with the case, obviously. Expecting specifics on this when speaking generally about the circumstance is absurd.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 29 2017, @01:19PM
For example, there's been some real ugly problems due to the subsidizing of US student loans (so that more people would have a college degree which is generally considered a good thing) such as education inflation over the past half century at several times the natural inflation rate and special non-dischargeable debt rules for student loans because of the unintended consequence of students declaring bankrupt after getting through college.
What we know is that high debt loads for young adults is bad (because that can stick around and even grow over the course of a life time), yet US society has deliberately created such a situation in order to help young adults. That creates a lot of problems for the person trying to succeed.
This is typical of government policy in the US and elsewhere. It creates a public good because some people are having hard luck, which in turn creates various incentives to cheat or exploit the system for gain. Then several heavy-handed regulations are created to deal with the cheating/exploitation which in turn adapts to the changing regulatory environment, and so on. You end up with a complex public good or service that requires considerable work to access for the people the program is supposed to help, a number of authoritarian impositions on personal freedom and promiscuous data collection, and a complex ecosystem of cheaters and exploiters working the system (often allowed to continue unimpeded as long as they don't rock the boat).
So even if a genuine case of someone trying and always failing is found, doesn't mean that this someone or we are better off by attempting to do something about it.
To summarize my attitude about success and failure, sure not everyone starts at the same level, but there is still more than enough opportunity to try for even the poorest. And the economy itself has a variety of ways to equalize wealth after the fact. Just because you started life rich, doesn't mean you'll stay rich. I also don't buy that people repeatedly trying and failing is a big enough problem that we have to do anything about it. You can always find anecdotal stories in an imperfect world. Even if we do want to fix something about that situation, we need to keep in mind that our intervention can and often does make things worse rather than better.