Since according to Bill Ackman the presence of a place you can buy eggs without a 100% markup is going to plunge NYC instantly into a Mad Max / Escape from New York style hellscape, what gangs are we all joining?
Personally I’m thinking the one of slightly sexy cultists who worship bodega cats.
How about you comrades?
What you don’t realize is Bill Ackman literally dumps his actual, evil plans straight onto social media through himself or surrogates. This guy has unlimited resources, he’s a billionaire.
This isn’t a hypothetical it’s an actual plan to destroy this as a possibility. Inject “we will pay people to x” in front of most of these bullet points. They pay people to sabotage this and create this city-wide food desert so they can destroy any spark of socialist hope and make the citizens of NYC beg to be saved by the oligarchs.
i’m not even joking. These guys have such egos they can’t actually do smokey back room planning they just put it all out there and laugh at us because we can’t do shit about it.
Or maybe not even laugh, they just don’t see a need for secrecy because they have never known as single obstacle to anything they do in their entire living memory.
(i’m not saying everything is a billionaire conspiracy but always look at stuff like this as trial balloons. even if they don’t hand out cash to shoplifters there are other ways to arrange things to fail)
The guy who tweeted this doesn’t understand economics and especially doesn’t understand microeconomics of grocery stores.
You are not going to have a small-scale player enter the industry to disrupt it. You need a large facility, and you need bulk logistics. Every item sold carries the embodied labor cost of how much time people’s hands are touching it. If you are just buying items off the public grocery shelves one at a time, you are (at least) doubling your shipping labor, tripling your stocking labor by unstocking and restocking it, (at least) doubling the point-of-sale labor, and using incredibly ineffective logistics by loading up a van instead of a semi trailer. You would be making a negative profit. Retail purchase as a supply method really doesn’t hold a candle to wholesale. Not to mention that the inelastic good of food is extremely cheap, and the only food items that would respond to market dynamics are inelastic ones.
I work in grocery/retail, and understanding these things is part of why I stay at this job.
Even if you make the huge assumption that food gets sold substantially below equilibrium prices, buying and reselling is not just a matter of pushing a button, like it is on the stock market, and it doesn’t necessarily make sense to try to chase after that discrepancy. I kind of wish these fuckers would try to do something like this and invest a lot of money into it because it would fail very quickly and very consistently. You’d need to pump a huge amount of money to keep it afloat, and that money would go into hiring lots more people, reducing the reserve of labor and driving up labor prices. You’d also open yourself up to “oops, I bought 8 items at the BigAppleMart on 53rd Street but 2 of them were ‘damaged’ in transit in my car” and “oops, I got held up by a gang as I was pulling in to the JohnGaltMart and they stole my entire cargo, please hire private security at a 1:1 ratio of actual GaltMart employees”
oh i know it’s all BS (i also been in the industry for a long time, from stocker to manager with access to financials and back again, and now nascent union organizer… shh that one is a secret)
that’s why I said they are just laying out their plans for sabotage. these plans aren’t realistic. they are designed to stoke fear into chuds and “personal responsibility” libs but have no basis in reality. nobody is going to actually make a criminal cottage industry out of this.
oh you know they are going to try, just to make a point and try to make this fail. it would be ironic if they create some kind of sabotage based grocery chain and drive up everyone’s wages. right now the industry is so brutal. our DM came by to try to figure out why all the good people are leaving and get ahead of unionization/wild cat striking. meanwhile i’ve been letting everyone know what their actual effective wage would be if this were an entirely worker owned company.
but i digress and yes I could see Ackman and his cohorts doing some ridiculous, fumbling moves by throwing money at this in an attempt to destroy it and just wasting money. because they are so, so bad at the very system they benefit from. it’s more likely they’ll just have Zohran killed or deported