• michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Were those little stores actually affordable to people on the bottom half of the income scale? Grocery stores are a great example. I would go bankrupt trying to shop for groceries at the corner store. People complain about the chains but I don’t recall small grocery stores ever being affordable.

    • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 day ago

      It’s true they can charge cheaper prices, and that’s why they’re able to put other stores out of business. The problem is, there are a lot of large-scale negative effects, but the decision of shopping there is usually beneficial on an individual level. It’s the “tragedy of the commons”.

      • andybytes@programming.dev
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        1 day ago

        I got love coffee. One of my favorite coffee places is this place called Upper Cup in Columbus, Ohio. I order beans from them, and I was able to talk to the owner. He didn’t seem like an anti-social, and when he told me he inspects the farms from time to time and sees who he imports from, so it’s ethically sourced, I believed him. Let’s just say he’s a lying bastard and I was fooled. His coffee is still better than Starbucks. I hated Starbucks before it was cool. I hated Tesla before it was cool and it wasn’t because there were a bunch of genocideers. It’s because they’re trash. They’re absolute trash. The issue is the herd mentality. Yet we are rugged individuals and very selfish as a culture. For some reason, this type of mentality ends up creating a herd which is contrary to what their own self-perception is. I think it’s just a collective self-hate that’s going on here and people too stupid to see. It’s a motherfucking paradox.