There's much blustering about how yet another Silicon Valley starts-up, Bodega, wants to drive actual bodegas out of business. Whiny talking points include claims that the little shops are the entry point to the American Dream for impoverished immigrants and how dare anyone create a vending machine to put them out of business?
Well, yes, except that the entire point of this innovation, which capitalist free-marketry encourages, is to drive other people out of business by giving them a better product at a better value. We should all be on our knees thanking mammon that this is how it works too.
Fast Company has the initial report:
Called Bodega, this startup installs unmanned pantry boxes in apartments, offices, dorms, and gyms. It promises convenience, but also represents competition for many mom-and-pop stores.
It's the "but" which is the error there. Competition is not the "but," but the reason. The desirable thing in and of itself is that someone is competing with small shops.
Salon, not where we usually go for economic understanding, is equally on the wrong side of this:
But the concept, as well as the title, has received backlash because it essentially threatens to put mom-and-pop stores, as well as actual bodegas, out of business.
We really should be saying "Huzzah!" here – the aim and point is always to put the other guys out of business. The Guardian tells us of the fury:
"It's sacrilegious to use that name, and we're going to do whatever we need to do to fight this," Frank Garcia, chair of the New York State Coalition of Hispanic Chambers of Commerce, told the Guardian. "It was devastating to find out … and it's not fair to the local bodegas now that don't have the angel investors that these guys have."
Frank, I've some news for you: The entire aim of our economy is that we're trying to put every single producer of everything and anything out of business. This goes by a number of different names (technological advance, economic growth, just us all collectively getting richer), but the basic idea is the devoutly-desired outcome of our entire economic system.
Henry Ford worked for decades to put all those buggy whip-makers out of business. Sam Walton bankrupted many a mom & pop store as he brought Walmart and its "everyday low prices" to the world. The entire Industrial Revolution started with the Spinning Jenny putting every single housewife out of the hand-spinning business – and yes, that spinning to make homespun was a, if not the, major economic activity for women before about 1760 or so.
What we're actually trying to do in the economy is sate one or more of those unlimited human desires and wants in the most efficient manner possible.
Efficiency here really centers on the use of as little human labor as possible. It being the time of our own lives which is the only truly non-renewable resource that we've got, we'd like thus the most production, and thus possible consumption, from each hour of it.
If a machine can sate that desire for a late night snack or an emergency pack of diapers, instead of the labor of some poor but honest immigrant, then that's absolutely excellent. Because the labor of that immigrant can then instead be applied to sating some other desire or want. We are thus collectively richer as more than one desire is dealt with — one by the machine, the other by the human.
Driving other businesses out of the marketplace and bankrupting them, is not an error nor a tragedy, it's the point of the damn economic process. If we the consumers prefer the machines, then the bodegas will be toast — and how excellent that will be. If we prefer that human contact and community to the soulless products of venture capital, that's just copacetic.
For that is our system, how we have quite deliberately set things up to work. Everyone gets to compete to provide what the consumer wants and if they succeed, they get rich — if they fail they go bust. Some centuries of this process being what has made us the richest society ever to bestride the Earth.
Putting bodegas out of business isn't the error. It's the point.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute.
If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.
Read again Bodega wants to drive bodegas out of business - excellent, that's the point of business : http://ift.tt/2flOJbGBagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Bodega wants to drive bodegas out of business - excellent that's the point of business"
Post a Comment