Salt is salt is salt, except when it comes in a blue canister with a little girl with an umbrella on it and the promise that rain won't damage its pourability. Instead, they are haunted by the specter of that wheat market. Luckily for them, though, we're much further from that world of perfect competition than much recent hype would suggest. What the term means is simply the conversion of the market for a given product into a commodity market, which is characterized by declining prices and profit margins, increasing competition, and lowered barriers to entry. Microprocessors are commoditized.
Love is commodified.
But analyses of the prospects for the personal-computer industry or the banking industry or even the clothing industry reveal a permanent anxiety. What companies rely on for profits today they assume will most likely not be there tomorrow, because tomorrow someone else will be making the very same thing for less. In this universe, even the paranoid may not survive. Insofar as commoditization is a reality, it's all to the good for consumers. It is witness to the enormous distance U.S. corporations have traveled from the inefficiencies and quality-control debacles of the 1970s.