Sometimes I stop and think about all the wonderful things we take for granted in our lives. Cars. Indoor plumbing. Heating and air conditioning.
But my favorite example is the grocery store.
Modern grocery stores are amazing. You can walk into one virtually any time and find an incredible selection of fruits, vegetables, meats, snacks, treats, and drinks. Out of season? No such thing. Want strawberries in January? No problem.
Grocery stores are so amazing that it’s hard to believe no one is in charge. How do they manage to have all the things we want, all the time? Who coordinates the farmers, food processors, truckers, and store owners to make this happen?
The answer, of course, is no one. The invisible hand of the free market takes care of it for us.
And it does a spectacular job.
Consider a thought experiment. Suppose that tomorrow, every grocery store on Earth disappeared. To keep this hypothetical from getting too morbid, let’s assume we all have a stockpile of emergency protein paste to sustain us in the meantime.
How would we get our grocery stores back?
More specifically, which system would you trust to bring them back the fastest, with the best selection and lowest prices: the free market or a government central planner?
I’ll take the free market every time.
Imagine what would happen. With grocery stores gone and everyone growing tired of protein paste, the demand for fresh food would be enormous. Prices for whatever food was available would rise, creating powerful incentives for people to figure out how to get more food to consumers.
Farmers and food processors would be eager to sell their products. Entrepreneurs would start buying food from them and finding ways to get it to customers. Roadside stands would pop up. Trucking companies would pivot toward food delivery, bringing truckloads of food into cities.
Someone would open a small store on short notice. Then another store would open. It would offer better prices. Another would offer more selection. A fourth store would stay open later. Successful stores would expand, and others would imitate them. Before long, we’d have supermarkets again, stocked with an astonishing variety of products.
No one would have designed the system. No one would have needed to. Millions of people, each pursuing their own interests, would have collectively rebuilt something remarkable.
Now imagine putting a government agency in charge of the same task. I don’t know exactly how that would go, but I wouldn’t want to bet my lunch on it going well.
Of course, markets aren’t perfect, and governments have an important role to play. But it’s worth appreciating just how much of our everyday prosperity comes from people responding to prices, competing for customers, and finding ways to make things better.
We take grocery stores for granted because they’ve always been there for us. But the extraordinary abundance they provide is no accident. It’s the predictable result of a system that rewards people for figuring out how to give others what they want.
With a functioning free market, grocery stores are inevitable. And that’s a pretty amazing thing.
