From: pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger)
Subject: Capitalist Restaurant Oligarchy
Organization: Partnership for an America Free Drug
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 20:59:16 GMT

ajc1@mail.ast.cam.ac.uk (Andrew Cooke) writes:
>In article <1993Jan25.225109.9481@shearson.com>, pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) writes:
>
>|> There isn't a single Wendy's or Taco Bell or Sainsbury's or Tescos or
>|> Safeway in New York City where I live. I don't even have any idea what
>|> a Tescos or Sainsbury's might be. There are dozens of different chains
>|> of supermarkets in New York, along with lots of "one of a kind" corner
>|> stores. There are thirty thousand restaurants in New York, of which
>|> chain restaurants constitute a tiny fraction of the whole -- under
>|> five percent at best. I'd say that your contention does not appear to
>|> be correct.
>
>	ok, some of the names are british chain-stores.  my
>	point wasn't that all restaurants are owned by a single world-
>	wide corporation, surprisingly enough, but that some large
>	businesses do exist in these areas.  i will try to make it a
>	little simpler below:
>
>	in my home town the shops have been steadily closing
>	down for the last ten years.  all that remain are charity
>	shops (i think the american might be thrift shops), a bakers
>	and an off-licence.  the main cause, as far as i can see, is
>	that large supermarkets have opened stores on the edges of
>	nearby larger towns.

This is hardly a new observation -- economies of scale mean that many
of the smaller stores in the U.S. have closed because nearby WallMarts
and K-Marts have opened up. Well, so what? The large chain merchandise
stores have a reason for existing -- they deliver goods cheaper and in
greater variety to the consumer. I don't see what the problem with
them is. Indeed, I'd say that if your argument is based on the notion
that variety would be destroyed by these chains, you are standing on
weak ground -- one of the reasons people go to Wallmart is because it
has a lot more and greater variety of merchandise. If your argument is
that the large chains are anti-competitive, one need merely look at
the viscious competition between them and their prices to dispatch
with that notion.

Even so, of course, the chain stores have not completely replaced
smaller stores. The phenomenon has mostly been experienced in
non-urban areas where distribution costs and bulk buying have made for
a particularly big advantage in price and quality for the large
chains. Again, I must emphasize that this has increased, not
decreased, the variety of goods available, and has decreased, not
increased, the price to the consumers. Here in New York, I can go to
quite a large variety of places -- but then again there are always
differences in variety available in a place with a high population
density which can support a large number of stores.

>	travelling through america i was amazed that every town
>	i stopped in had a mcdonalds (ok, perhaps greyhounds have
>	some sort of arrangement with the chain - i don't know) or
>	a taco-bell or whatever.  reading alt.macdonalds i found
>	that most of these places are owned by a smaller number of
>	even larger businesses.

They do all have their McDonalds. So what? The McDonalds or Burger
King merely replaced the old one-off hamburger joint that was there
before the McDonalds, and there is likely to be a diner in the town as
well. The diners are all owned by locals, but they all serve the same
basic food -- culinary oligarchy enforced by the limited tastes of the
people living there, if you want to be silly about it.

>	what would be the physical structure of an 'anarcho-capitalist'
>	society?  do you think your system would work in rural regions,
>	or is somewhere like new york necessary to sustain diversity?

There is always more diversity in a place like New York. In New York,
it is possible for me to buy a gourmet dinner at 4:30 in the morning
-- primarily because in a city of eight million people you can support
very specialized businesses. No matter what you are going to do there
will be more diversity in cities. However, this does not mean that the
arguments work less well in rural regions. As I've pointed out, when
the Wallmart moves into your county in Arkansas, you do lose the
mom-and-pop dry goods store, but the Wallmart has five times the
number of types of sheets and towels on sale and charges less so
you've actually won, not lost. Doubtless the variety of security
services available in rural areas will be lower than in urban areas --
but on the other hand people in rural areas have fewer crimes to worry
about, and there will likely still be plenty of competition. It would
likely be a good thing for large security companies to move in to such
areas, anyway -- consider, for example, how much easier it would be
for a security company with branches all over the state to manage a
crowd of roudy KKK members than it is for a single town's outgunned
sheriff.

In terms of "giant corporations taking over", I doubt that this will
happen in general. Large corporations are structures that aren't very
efficient, as almost anyone working for one can tell you. Big
companies like IBM tend to self destruct. Their one advantage in the
marketplace is that they can handle the wads of regulations coming out
of the bureaucratic offices in Washington more easily -- small
companies often drown in the paperwork. Without this advantage, I
suspect that the economy would fragment into far smaller company units
than are now favored. To some extent, this has already happened in
fast moving areas like high technology.

--
Perry Metzger		pmetzger@shearson.com
--
Laissez faire, laissez passer. Le monde va de lui meme.
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy