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?

  • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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    8 hours ago

    People will buy [groceries, which usually rely on abundant shelf storage space and refrigeration and the trust of name-recognition and the advantage of a fixed, predictable location] at below-market prices and resell them

    I’ll be part of the gang that buys up produce to resell it, but to keep it from spoiling, stores it in brine and then carts it around on rickshaws at zero cost to sell in the black market, proving this abstract model of economics right.

    This gang is known as

    the Pickle Ricks.

  • Cimbazarov [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    11 hours ago

    If Zorhan does half the shit these out of touch billionaires think hes going to do, i’ll move to nyc in an instant

    Also lmao that alot of the bad effects they are warning about are already happening under capitalism

  • Des [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    11 hours ago

    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)

    • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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      8 hours ago

      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”

      • Des [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.net
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        7 hours ago

        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.

        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.

        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

  • LangleyDominos [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    11 hours ago

    These people are going to do this. They will send people to steal from these stores and make a silly ebay listing. If that doesn’t work they’ll send people to poison the food in the stores. NYC is going to need a lot of help from leftists to make these projects work.

    • infuziSporg [e/em/eir]@hexbear.net
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      8 hours ago

      I am definitely going to pay shipping and handling costs for 3 boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese and a 1-pound pack of chicken breasts. Public grocery stores will never compete with this.

      Any day now, the eBay stores will start accepting food stamps.

  • BeamBrain [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    12 hours ago

    Combatribes had some of the absolute best gang names so I will be joining the Motorcycle Nuclear Warheads or the Slash Skate Screamers

  • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    12 hours ago

    Stores will sell goods at below cost

    People will steal from stores without fear of reprisal

    Spoken like someone who definitely understands why people steal food to begin with.

  • Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.net
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    13 hours ago

    There are 17 states with Alcoholic Beverage Controls who operate state-run liquor stores. I guess it’s true that private liquor stores are unable to compete, because they’re illegal, but there hasn’t been a liquor shortage in what, 92 years?

  • Rojo27 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    14 hours ago

    Chuds: BIDEN MADE EGGS TOO EXPENSIVE, TRUMP WILL FIX THE ECONOMYfrothingfash

    Also chuds: WHAT? YOU CAN’T JUST SUBSIDIZE GROCERIES, WHAT ABOUT THE SMOL BEAN BUSINESS OWNERS?frothingfash

    • MolotovHalfEmpty [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      14 hours ago

      Private grocery stores cannot compete and go out of business.

      And the public ones just, don’t expand to take over the demand because well… erm… I mean… I suppose they can’t because… well… THEYRE EVILL SOCIALLISTS! STARVATION IS THE POINT! THEYLL STARVE US ALL BECUASSE COMMNUNISM WORSE THAN HITTLER 5BAJILLION DEAD!!!