Modern Woes
Lifted from the comments, some beverage-related economics news:
This is like the entire left versus right debate on markets pic.twitter.com/5PlEn1uWS5
— wanye (@xwanyex) April 29, 2026
What things actually cost is “incredibly rightwing,” apparently.
As Rafi says in reply,
The inability to grasp how things work is quite remarkable. There’s an air of imperviousness. And it does, I think, capture something of broader attitudes. Certainly, I’ve had several not dissimilar conversations.
I’m now poking at the implication that the All Powerful State should have an army of po-faced minions patrolling the nation’s coffee shops, correcting the price of oat milk and other disgusting boutique substances. Regardless of the actual cost to the owner of the coffee shop.
And so, not comprehending fairly obvious things, despite being adults, Our Betters invoke conspiracies and call for a kind of ludicrous tyranny.
By the way, Mr Cohen – the chap upset at having to pay a few extra cents for oat milk in his coffee – is an assistant professor of sociology at Berkeley. He has pronouns in his bio.
He teaches those less knowledgeable and worldly than himself.
Oh, and being an assistant professor of sociology, a statusful intellectual, Mr Cohen has, at the time of writing, not seen fit to respond to any of the numerous comments pointing out his error.
Including polite and informative replies from owners of coffee shops.
Who knew running a small coffee shop was so enormously, effortlessly lucrative?
I think the yacht complainers have Starbucks confused with a coffee shop.
On a related note, why do the socialist, “fair-minded”, woke, etc coffee shops keep going out of business? They’re doing everything according to the “correct” economics. And yet they can’t keep the doors open, let alone buy a yacht.
As my mum used to say “They know the price of everything but the value of nothing”.
https://thompsonblog.co.uk/2026/04/modern-woes.html#comment-211677
Ccscientist said…
I’ve been known to “rail” about the same thing but for rather different reasons. A supermarket trip thirty years ago would have involved about fifteen minutes in the place. You could actually find what you wanted without being confronted with dozens of what are basically the same thing. Not any more.
I solved that problem by figuring out which brands and varieties I preferred, after which I ignored everything else.
Supermarkets are kinda special this way. First it is a bit of a shelf space issue. Especially at supermarkets where the same item, for example maraschino cherries, can be found in multiple places, for example near the ice cream, near the boxed cake mixes, in the canned/jarred fruit aisle. But instead of all the brands available in each space, because product is spread out across the store and only a few jars of each brand are in each location, sometimes at one of those locations there aren’t any available.
Also given the finite space, as the number of brands increase, the space-per-brand must inevitably decrease. Which is even more of a problem in the smaller stores of a given company. Publix in Florida, which we have multiple to choose from depending on where we are, has stores from 30,000 to 50,000 square feet. Finding certain items that we regularly buy becomes a challenge. Especially at beach side locations which are more likely to be smaller and more likely to have even less shelf space for food items because they also want to offer impulse-buy beach and fishing stuff.
Additionally, it seems that grocery stores are far more likely to move products around to different aisles. I suspect that they are more prone to do so because the volume of sales/shelf life is different than other kinds of stores, and the marketing aspect, as far as product positioning goes, is more important due to generally lower profit margins.