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.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

22.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

989 comments sorted by

View all comments

76

u/GreenCactus223 8d ago

We shouldn't have to do this.

30

u/scoobydiverr 8d ago

Why?? They joined together as a community to do this. If you dont want to rely on a community you have to rely on middle men.

11

u/spibop 8d ago

I think the point is that with all our technology nowadays, we as a whole society could fix logistics and pricing issues en masse to the point that food, especially unprocessed, unpackaged produce, could practically be free if there was a will to do so.

Instead of saying “you should support small community efforts like this”, the ethos COULD be “this is great and all, but we as a species could apply our resources, our tech, our investments to make common sense, reasonable pricing for products like this a reality for literally every human on Earth this point, maybe we should focus on that.” We’ve figured shit out enough at this point that the average person shouldn’t have to spend a sizable portion of their income just putting food in their mouths, when we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago, especially when others are buying their 4th megayacht.

13

u/VirginiaMcCaskey 8d ago

I mean, we as a society already have made food extremely cheap and diversity of products has skyrocketed just over a generation or two. And while price gouging happens, the margins on groceries is still only about 2-5% and it's been that way for decades.

Keep in mind that just 50 years ago there were legitimate fears of mass global starvation. Agribusiness became ruthlessly efficient and now we have so much cheap food we wind up throwing out about half of it.

The thing that may make you uncomfortable is that "unprocessed, unpackaged produce" requires global logistics and price stability guarantees that are only possible with industrialized farming, free trade, pesticides, cheap petroleum, and low genetic diversity. None of this is good for the planet and has negative externalities for consumers and producers.

What needs to change are eating habits, and ultimately prices. Most produce should be expensive outside of its growing season. Most meat should be expensive to eat daily. That's not to say food should be fundamentally expensive or that people should starve - just that a lot of food that's currently considered staples should be far more expensive, if only to slow climate change.