Forum Post: The corner grocery store.....

A old couple opened a small grocery store in their neighborhood. The neighbors like it because they don’t have to travel very far to get a loaf of bread. The old couple like it because they make a living on the profits. Now this is capitalism in a very small dose. What happens is that somebody in corporate America notices money is being made in small neighborhoods. So they open a large food store on the outskirts of town and offer many items that the old couple just cannot afford to keep on their shelves. So far the game is actually fair, because that is the nature of capitalism: we call it better prices because of competition. This is sort of the way it should have been. Unfortunately, the large food chain wanted a bigger slice of the pie. So they did what they have always done. They work towards getting the city council to enact ordinances which disallow neighborhood stores. Now they buy out grandma and grandpa knowing no one else can get a permit to open a store because of the new ordinances. And everyone is really happy!

So now we have mega shopping centers and grandma and grandpa are down in the Caribbean living a life of luxury. So what can possibly go wrong, you ask? Oh I am so glad you asked that.

The mega stores now are in competition with each other so they scramble to find wholesale products that are cheaper. This causes a shift to buy from foreign markets which are much cheaper. And that starts a small problem here at home. The corporation is making more money but it also contributes to unemployment (if you need this explained you are brain dead). Those who became unemployed go back to school so they can compete for a job.

I really have no problem with any of the above actions, with of course the possible exception of greasing the palms of city commissioners. If it stayed at this level (back to the mid 1960s) things would be fine. The problem is that corporations wanted to make more money (this is the greedy part). But selling a real product was not going to cut it because everybody was selling the same damn thing. It was about the early 70s when oil companies figured out that they could make more money on the sale of gasoline by selling it on credit…now enters the Gas Credit Card. Wow that worked real well and eventually everybody was issuing credit cards. Damn fine way to make money. And within a few years time people were addicted to purchasing stuff with credit cards. Hell, everybody was happy! And it would still be working just fine if not for a small glitch: inflation on prices that soared beyond incomes and job loss. When that started happening banks started to notice less profit. Well the answer was simple enough….predatory loans. Opps, big mistake….Too many ‘have nots’ with not enough income to actually buy anything anymore. The parasites (the banks) killed off the damn host.

Of course it is much more complicated than what I have presented here but this is how I think we got into the mess we are in. It is true that greed played a large roll in all of this but greed alone did not create the problem….there was a large factor of corporate stupidity in all of this. I really believe that much of the problem could have been avoided if the corporations had been regulated to play fair. Well, besides buying products they also purchased the entire government structure to insure that they got what they wanted. And you know the rest of the story…it started with the housing market falling apart. Sometimes you really have to be careful of what you ask for….

What really pissed everyone off was that corporate America was bailed out by the very people they screwed….us….the taxpayers.

Can we fix this? The entire world economy is on the brink of collapse due largely to the idiots that run corporations and our government. Nope…it can’t be fixed. It is a cancer that has metastasized. There is no cure….patient dies….in this case the patient is capitalism.