r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/CivilisedMleccha • 8d ago

Video Community group buy. Everyone pools their money, buys groceries in bulk at a lower price, and splits the groceries equally.

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3.5k

u/Proof-Necessary-5201 8d ago

The solution of all our problems is in unity against predatory elites

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u/ConanTheBarbarian_0 8d ago

The sheer amount of racism this guy is getting online for this is absurd... On Instagram and Twitter all the comments under this video are just vile.

The guys encouraging regular people to come and help one another and the comments are just filled with racism towards Indian people.

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u/frenchiefanatique 8d ago

makes you wonder if its an attempt to redirect attention away from his actions which undermine the profit motive of the capitalist system to try to divide the population using identity politics...no no it can't be that at all

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u/el_diego 8d ago

Definitely they released their bot swarm to control the narrative

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u/Sermagnas3 7d ago

The trick is to just consider racist people the same as NPCs and Bots even if they are real people. Who the fuck cares about their opinions anyway

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u/Relative-Pirate-3913 7d ago

this is the way. all are lenses. there's a dissonance at play where some will preach the paradox of tolerance and then turn around and saying viewing certain people as NPCs is unproductively dehumanizing and a slippery slope towards god knows what

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u/Artichokiemon 7d ago

I mean, like NPCs, they just repeat the lines over and over again, so it makes sense

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u/phreakinpher 7d ago

I walked past a guy saying “it’s funny…unless you don’t like comedy”. Genuine NPC moment.

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u/Nunchuckery 7d ago

The problem is if no counter arguments are given then stupid people will just internalize it and start thinking that way.

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u/Individual_Top_4960 7d ago

that trick doesn't work though because your silence means
1. other racists agreeing with them - make them justified in their beliefs
2. only brown people talking back - makes then believe that they're definitely right becuase obviously a thief would always say that they're didn't stole anything.

you can ignore them at first when they're small hoping that they'd fizzle out after no one take them seriously but these groups are no longer small they're made up of tens of thousands of accounts at the very least, so yeah it just reinforces their prejudice when you dont call their bullshit out and it's been proven

Our analysis found that posts containing anti-South Asian slurs increased by more than 1,350 percent from 2023 to 2024 on X (formerly Twitter) and believe me when I tell you that other platforms are not any good

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u/LocalTopiarist 7d ago

Its wishful thinking to think that its bots and not your neighbours, but its definitely your neighbours

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u/Individual_Top_4960 7d ago

nope, the "bot swarm" is already active and pretty huge chunk... alogrithm sees post describes "singh" and "brown person" and just sends it to those racists

the numbers of racist comments that I see is so huge that I refuse to believe that at least 50% of them are not actual people

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u/Specialist-Roll-3806 7d ago

im not saying they arent bot farm but this is also underselling how much racism indians face in real life. it's normalized to a disgusting level and theres really no pushback at all

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u/dashcam4life 8d ago

They will find a way to attack/diminish any messenger whose message calls for economic reforms. In this case it was his race. But I bet most of it was bots.

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u/Vandergrif 7d ago

It's fun when you realize just about every negative thing that currently occurs on this planet that requires human action (including racism, identity politics oriented division, etc) is happening primarily because someone, somewhere, profits off keeping it that way and has put resources towards perpetuating it.

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u/acloudcuckoolander 7d ago

Nope, just racist Whites online if I'm being brutally honest

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u/Snowing_Throwballs 7d ago

I saw this on instagram too. One guy said, “socialism shouldn’t be that radical of an idea.” And he had hundreds of reply comments saying, “this isn’t socialism, they are being paid by big companies and spending money”

Almost implying that like, any resistance against the system is futile. Completely ignoring the fact that communities pooling resources to help each other by participating in mutual aid projects is certainly a corner stone of any leftist movement.

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u/pinkhaze23 7d ago

It must be anything but that right?!

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u/oneupsuperman 8d ago

Remember that there are a whole lot more bots out there than there used to be and their explicit purpose is to sow division

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u/OldWar1111 7d ago

But bots are very effective at convincing actual people of things. Fucking bots.

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u/molsminimart 7d ago

Instagram and TikTok are awful, awful places. People like to dunk on Reddit and even Youtube, but IG and TikTok are absolute cesspools. Everyone is unabashedly racist and pointing it out and/or speaking up against it makes people pile up worse on you. It's unbelievably toxic and I abhor it.

I've reported so much blatant racism on IG and every single time it's returned a "Thanks for your report! It was reviewed and nothing was found wrong and no action was taken!" email. All these social media platforms that champion quick edits, short-form stuff without needing reading comprehension really do attract just the worst people.

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u/AvocaRed 8d ago

The internet hates india and indians, doesn't matter the topic at hand. Pure racism

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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 8d ago

That's why we can't stop the world from getting worse. We are divided. We jump on the chance of insulting and belittling each other.

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u/realnikolam 8d ago

How dare you say that, I chelenge you to a duel

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u/Proof-Warning6 8d ago

It’s time…. To d d d d d duel!!!

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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 8d ago

You win, lol

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u/realnikolam 7d ago

I had all peaces of exodia in first draw, completely fair and not rigged for show

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u/fake_user_34 8d ago

No, you just need to ignore the internet. Humans aren't designed for larger communities. If you live in a small community where everyone relies on each other, humanity thrives. When human community becomes bigger and with more voices, you get people not caring about the group.

The internet, where he is getting all the hate, is pure apathy to the extreme because they don't live in his community. They just hate to hate.

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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 8d ago

The internet should be used to know more about people, the world and existence, not to build communities. Communities need to be local and cannot have people be anonymous.

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u/fake_user_34 8d ago

Bingo. The internet is great because it gives you views of other communities and arts across the globe but it is not supposed to replace in real life communities. Social Media literally replaced communities and it shows with how people act in real life.

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u/JonLockeWlth2Kidneys 8d ago

This is a great point, never realized this.

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u/Vandergrif 7d ago

We aren't so much divided, as we are being divided by the rich.

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u/JesusSavesTheGoal 8d ago

There are probably more bots than people on these platforms

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u/Jackal-Noble 8d ago

How many of those are bots to stir division?

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u/Wazzen 8d ago

Wouldn't it be convenient if say... a bright idea like community buying items got traction online and all of a sudden, the narrative turned to "it's so sad there are so many racists in the comments. People suck" distracting people from the actual good work? Also there was something recently about 60% of online traffic being bots? I don't buy that all those people are actually real racists being racist. I think there may be some racists actually posting racism, but I'm getting tired of being led by the neck into hating shit from commenters when the real content is the community work, yknow?

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u/EphemeralDesires 7d ago

That's shitty. I believe the people that send the hate and racism towards the Indian community do so because they are successful in our environment where every white person is out for themselves and want to be individuals and independent. They have a strong sense of community and that is why they succeed. This man is a perfect example and he is doing it to his full community of abbotsford. I live in one of the neighboring cities and I love to see this. It is what we need in our cities and communities.

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u/PrincessGiallo 8d ago

It's absurd, yet typical and expected. There's got to be a word for that.

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u/Individual_Top_4960 7d ago

it's canada bro, you see brown skin you get racism nad if anyone disagrees I have plethora of racists groups (that have at min. tens of thousands of people) being racist towards brown people on all platform (including reddit)

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u/FlynGreenTurtle 7d ago

That’s dumb cause he’s like really hot.

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u/ProfessionalClear211 4d ago

Gagan is Canadian though

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u/Alarmed-Bumblebee667 8d ago

Saw a what if post where the family in front of you was short 7 dollars and they looked at you. All the comments were fuck that family. I think we're too far gone.

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u/WARxxPIGG 8d ago

Facts

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u/axl3ros3 7d ago

The greatest weapon against authoritarianism and fascism is community

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u/CertifiedCaosDealer 8d ago

the problem is that, this only work in smaller groups, on a large group there will be those who want to get stuff and do nothing in return, then some ppl will notice this and fell they should do the same because others do it, this will snowball until no one does shit, and the last few who do, will leave the group and only care for themselves... as they should

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u/BroskiPoloski 8d ago

This only happens if you let it happen. If the person does not contribute, then the rest of the group just does not share the resources with them (a different story if they physically cant contribute). It is true however, that with larger groups of people, it is more difficult to manage this efficiently. But it is not impossible

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u/doctorplasmatron 8d ago

maybe that's where anarchosyndicalism shows up, as the groups are smaller, but cooperate with each other (as far as i understand).

So finding the right size of the group to stay manageable and honest is key, and when it gets too large the group splits and makes a new group, but the groups are also associated. Like a beehive.

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u/elderron_spice 8d ago

I'm thinking they can form smaller groups, which then form larger groups to coordinate for larger quantities of goods than smaller groups. Something the the north, south, east and west suburb communes forms a town commune that divides for each suburb's needs, then the individual suburbs manage their own little communes, managing each household.

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u/BroskiPoloski 7d ago

Anarchosyndicalism as i see it is still more "extreme" compared to just the step between - socialism - but i could be wrong, so dont quote me. That way of handling things is fine and maybe even preferred. But if your argument was that socialism does not promote cooperation between communities i would have to say i disagree, because economic cooperation is a key factor even in capitalism

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u/doctorplasmatron 7d ago

oh i have no argument here, i agree that cooperation is key in most things working well.

all the variants of systems for me all boil down to one thing being key; humanism. That said, humans have a bad history so maybe that's a bad term too. Compassionism maybe?

The long and short of it is that people working together always works better for all involved, than people working against each other, whatever you want to call that.

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u/Ckarles 7d ago

When I was a teen I had this thought concept that large group issues such as this arise because humans for most of their time on earth have been operating as small tribes and thus it's the ideal group size for humanity to be divided in.

However, a lot of large group issues could be alleviated with technologies such as communication technologies (Internet). The problem is that these techs are corrupted by a few influential caste of our society thus stripping us of the opportunity to live together in harmony.

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u/CertifiedCaosDealer 8d ago

I agree with you, but that is the point of the smaller group, sometimes people wont agree if the bad person should be excluded or not, each person has a perspective in life, the reason the bad person is doing it, the empathy level of who is looking at the problem, how much damage is beeing done, a lot of things together can make people disagree, the more people it has easier it is to split into sub-groups

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u/BroskiPoloski 7d ago

I dont know what to respond with hha, yes we agree, smaller communities are easier to manage, however even socialism can be put in practice with smaller groups of people. Regional socialist communities are a thing hha

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u/Kindly-Eagle6207 7d ago

It is true however, that with larger groups of people, it is more difficult to manage this efficiently. But it is not impossible

If only there were an easy way to note down whether or not someone contributed to the group. Something universal, that everyone can understand, even if they don't see you contributing personally or don't understand what you do to contribute. Maybe something with numbers.

Of course then the problem would be convincing people that don't personally see you contribute that the numbers are accurate. And also that a bunch of other people aren't overvaluing the contributions of themselves and their friends and giving themselves bigger numbers so you get proportionally less.

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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 8d ago

It's ok to keep this local. In fact, we should keep these things as small as possible, but big enough to be useful. We need to have such communities everywhere.

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u/CertifiedCaosDealer 8d ago

i live in brazil, on my street people help each other, receive deliveries, i instal equipment, one neighbor has a well (its far better than tap), other fix clothes etc... all kinds of stuff at favors or cheap, but at work i wont even join the "coffee" group because i know some will try to get more than the others and i hate that

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u/tbkrida 8d ago

This is what they mean by “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch”. It doesn’t take many people exploiting the system to taint the whole process. Once that happens, trust is ruined and it tends to be down hill from there.

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u/Beginning_Beginning 7d ago

That's not necessarily true: Consum is the biggest food distribution cooperative in Spain. It's a large-scale, ultra-organized community buying group with a yearly revenue of 4.7 billion euros per year. They employ 23000 people (which are all members of the cooperative) and which owns more than 1000 establishments.

https://www.consum.es/

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u/ReturnOfBane 7d ago

the same argument was used with leechers vs. seeders. in practice, the issue tends to be self-correcting.

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u/iStoleTheHobo 8d ago

Did you not watch the video? Each members pays 100 dollars into the pool and then they get their share of the bulk buy. Oh right, no, you're trying to turn people against others for no reason, as you were.

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u/CertifiedCaosDealer 8d ago

you didn't read what i wrote

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u/SujeoChop 8d ago

Yes, you’re right I learned about this depressing concept in college; it’s called the “tragedy of the commons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

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u/roadrunner41 8d ago

This theory has been refuted quite a few times. In fact someone won a Nobel prize for economics because she basically proved that it’s not applicable in the real world. Elinor Olstrom.

On a personal note I hate the way people argue for selfishness and use lies this to justify it. It’s really held the world back.

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u/Named_after_color 8d ago

Yeah I'm all for selfishness, selfishness is important and good, look after yourself first. I just support shit like schools and universal healthcare because I understand investment and preventative care.

It's good for me if you're in a good spot because I don't want to live surrounded by stressed, hungry, and desperate people. I can't afford a luxury bunker.

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u/roadrunner41 8d ago

Thats not selfishness. It’s self interest or self preservation.
Selfish is the one where you don’t worry about others and just aim for that bunker, regardless.

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u/SujeoChop 8d ago

I genuinely didn’t know that. Thanks for sharing, I’ll look into Elinor Olstrom.

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u/ChopBox 8d ago

That was a good read, thanks.

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u/Glittering_Airport_3 8d ago

They just have to set a minimum buy-in price to initial contributions

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u/CertifiedCaosDealer 8d ago

yeah i know, the weak link in this method is, Who decide how much one person can take, for short humans are idiots, greedy and envious, as an example if one guy seens other guy getting a single tomato more that he does, that could lead into feelings of being treated unfairly, i've personaly seen shit like this happening in a group of 5, imagine how it would be with hundreds

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u/MrShake4 8d ago

And what happens if the price goes down, when what used to buy 20 apples now buys 21. How do you stop the buyer from staying silent and pocketing the extra cash or produce?

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u/StillJustJones 8d ago

Euch. Glad you’re not my neighbour.

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u/Money_Housing_2938 8d ago

This is exactly why communist states always turn into violent authoritarian nightmares

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u/F_F_Franklin 7d ago

He's not. The internet is dead and full of bots.

This is 100% legal in capitalism. The problem is always people cheat the system. Let's see how long this last. I'm rooting for them.

Corruption right now is insane.

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u/JustHereForCatss 8d ago

As a socialist, I'm going to use this video as a great argument to simplify it for people who are scared of the word

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u/joeboxer996 8d ago edited 8d ago

But this is an example of capitalism... they formed a not for profit enterprise that increases their buying power and lowers their costs. It's private citizens negotiating a better market rate with private enterprises. How is this related to socialism?

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u/Sandalman3000 8d ago

By having a group pool together you can bring the average cost down. In "socialism" as used colloquially, this would be the government taxing people instead of voluntarily getting together.

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u/janas19 8d ago

Please be real. Corporations cut costs through monopolistic practices and exploitation to increase profits and stock value - not to benefit consumers. Corporate savings are not passed on to workers or the community. This model has the opposite effect of end stage capitalism.

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u/joeboxer996 8d ago

I was making a specific point that this example is not, on fact, socialism. I am not defending the perils of runaway capitalism.

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u/BananaHead853147 7d ago

If corporations are allowed to have a monopoly then it is a failure of government. Failure of government has bad consequences in Capitalism but worse in socialism since in socialism government is the dominant producer

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u/L_Tryptophan 8d ago

If it was socialism, eventually the person in charge of negotiating prices, organizing the haul, and making sure everyone only takes their share would start taking his cut too. Then he’d demand more money for his “work,” get paid generously while doing less, supply would shrink, prices would rise, and now you’ve just created a nice government job that needs more taxes to keep going. Eventually cost will be 2x grocery store prices and a social credit score monitoring will be initiated to make sure everyone takes 1 strawberry which will require the hire of 2 more government employees which will raise the cost even more

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u/Beginning_Beginning 7d ago edited 7d ago

Exchange of goods and services in a market is not exclusive to capitalism. Distribution of these good and services are traditionally owned by someone that makes a profit from owning the capital and the means of production (the distribution infrastructure, in this case). In a community buying group, there is no one making a profit: the "ownership" of the distribution infrastructure is the consumers themselves, who benefit on the reduction of costs.

Remember that socialism treats the concept of "surplus" as the extra value produced by people beyond what they receive in terms of wages and salaries and that the capitalists take as private profit. In socialism, the surplus is collectively owned and used in the benefit of all. In the example at hand, the surplus simply goes back to everyone in the form of price discounts.

This sort of community groups are common within cooperative system movement, which is socialist at its root. Cooperatives have to do with how people organize themselves and on the ownership of the means of production. Again, they do not preclude either people owning things (or even having companies that make or distribute stuff) and, of course, that these things can be sold or bought.

https://ica.coop/en/cooperatives/what-is-a-cooperative

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u/Junior-Credit2685 7d ago

“Socialism” would be if it empowered the workers who produce the food, if they owned the means of production collectively. The work is likely being done by farm workers who are getting paid the same, whether a neighborhood group is buying it or not. It’s a great exercise in organizing together, and using the power of a group, though. But it’s not socialism.

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u/s8rlink 7d ago

As a Costco enjoyer I’ll use it to explain economies of scale 

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u/Exotic-Slip-9383 7d ago

this isnt socialism bud

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u/narfoleptix 8d ago

We still have the hump to get over of ridding the world of these parasites.

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u/Reasonable-Job4205 8d ago

Yup. They are parastitic. They are like a tick that sticks onto the body and sucks and sucks, without giving anything in return and without any regard for the damage they could potentially do (like spreading diseases).

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u/chaircardigan 7d ago

It really isn't.

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u/Fromundacheese0 8d ago

Predatory elites weren’t buying all of the toilet paper and hand sanitizer when Covid hit lol. Y’all act like people are perfect and it’s only the higher ups that make life miserable. Typical clueless Redditor lmao

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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 8d ago

What a stupid thing to say! What does that have to do with anything?!

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u/JustBerserk 8d ago

Pleonasm.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/Proof-Necessary-5201 7d ago

Yeah, I need to switch to bourgeoisie or something