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this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2026
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No Stupid Questions
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To put it simply, cost isn't the same for everybody.
Economies of Scale
Even beyond this:
Coca-cola and Walmart had a secret inside deal. Nobody could sell coke products for less than Walmart.
When they find out smaller grocery stores are undercutting Walmart to drive traffic, the wholesaler/distributor will go into those smaller chains and force them to pay even higher wholesale prices to force them to raise their prices.
Walmart gets bulk discounts nobody else on the planet receives, then games the market to hedge themselves against everyone else - not setting a fair market price floor, but rather a price ceiling.
They get to be the lowest priced, everyone else the highest.
Dude, as someone that worked, briefly, in retail at a corporate level, the agreements between the major players like Coke and Pepsi and the big boxes are like some Van Halen "no brown M&Ms" level shit on both sides of the equation.
I have seen emails describing what happens when a coke representative walks into one of those stores and finds that their product is not merchandised within X feet of X aisle or is out of stock on the shelf and there are serious financial sanctions for that shit. Something is minor as a customer setting a 12 pack of 7-Up on top of the stack of Sprite has gotten escalated to levels that would be ludicrous to a layman.
Everything, every single shelf or peghook or rack in that store, has a dollar amount attached to it, and the sums of money being exchanged over whether your product is placed at eye level or down on the bottom shelf is unreal.
At least the brown m&ms we're to see if people read the contract. That's just asinine
Yep. And boot-lickers of that kind of business ethics will always say "Well that's capitalism, baby!"
But it's really not. Capitalism as an economic theory IS those small businesses that are being driven under. It's human beings making a living from their own labour." Even if that human being is the person in charge and doesn't set foot on the sales floor (for example), it's still a human being at the helm.
My goto example for some reason is always furniture, I don't know why. But someone making bespoke wooden furniture out of his garage because he enjoys it and other people want to purchase it. That's capitalism.
If that same guy's product gets so big that he starts a company, get's a factory, and now has employees making the furniture for him, it's still capitalism because he built that company with his own sweat and he deserves to reap the benefits of such.
What's missing from what the bootlckers call capitalism is the human element.
When the human equation is taken away and everything is at the whim of a stock price, it's not capitalism anymore, it's called a Corporatocracy. Humans themselves become just another metric on a spreadsheet called "labour". Something to be accounted for, controlled and minimized for the sake of the share price. Those shares aren't owned by humans either (for the most part), they're owned by other corporations and hedge-funds. Humans are so far removed from modern corporatocracy that there's no room for (or even understanding of) empathy.
I'm fine with capitalism when the responsibility and expectations are proportionate with the compensation for a given job.
The problem is they're not, somehow the higher up the chain they get and more money they make, the less they actually seem to fucking do, and worse, the more insulated from their own decisions they become.
"It was a bad call, Ripley"
"Bad call!? 15 plant workers died because you denied a request for additional CO2 monitors in the processing shed!! What was your bonus for cutting that?!?"
Except unlike in Aliens, we don't even get to enjoy seeing the xenomorphs eat the assholes at the end.
Corporatocracy is part of, and the logical conclusion of, any economic system that values private profit. Capitalism is not the pure, uncorrupted version of this. (And from where I'm sitting you're a bootlicker too for takes like "he built that company with his own sweat and he deserves to reap the benefits of such." It conpletely ignores the labor everyone else put into that company, from the employees to the supply chain to the tax-funded infrastructure.)
Also, unless you're selling literally everything, they can pad their margins on what you don't provide, and pound you into the ground with loss-leaders, ON TOP of volume discounts. That's how Walmart destroyed local businesses, by taking "acceptable losses" selling below cost for a while until it broke the competition.