To complete the thought, the baker example is explicitly in opposition to OP's point. In the economy we exist in, a 3am artisan baker does so explicitly out of a care for craft and community.
Yes. Precisely so. As it happens, we've been friends with a "3am baker" for decades. We do not envy her life, but we do intensely enjoy her taste. Delighted to pay double for it.
I would argue that the killing of small businesses that care by chains that don't is that the vast majority of consumers are in a position where making even such choices as paying twice as much for a donut are luxuries. Salaries have been stagnant forever, with a boost during COVID but was then immediately undone with price gouging on the part of tons of essential-to-life industries. And do not come at me with inflation, it has been demonstrated, numerous times and is continuing to be demonstrated, as nothing more than profit seeking. Inflation was a factor, yes. Greedy bastard corporations were another, IMO much larger, factor.
The pandemic as a whole stomped the gas on an already running process of money being trapped in the hands of the uber rich, and if none of it is coming back down, then the amount of money everyone has to spend necessarily shrinks too. And this is not my usual pinko-commie-scum ass set of thoughts. This is a well understood principle that many economists have been banging on about for years now, because even those who believe capitalism is the best system, though I disagree with them on much, also understand that if all the damn money goes to the rich and stays there then the entire party ends REAL quick and probably violently.
The 3am baker currently exists because the people who benefit the most from the exploitation of labor have the extra money to buy artisan products. My great grandfather had a bakery. He and my great grandmother would bake their product and my grandfather and his brothers would deliver the product to local businesses and homes.
And then corporate breadmakers came in and made it impossible to compete from a price standpoint. Quality disappeared, and variety was subsequently crushed. The only people keeping his businesses open for a while were those who had fortunes that existed from owning a ton of land. They still wanted their oval loaves and fresh french bread and muffins.
Essentially most consumers just didn't care about quality and preferred the lower price over the higher quality product. That seems like normal consumer choice. The people didn't get poorer all of a sudden when the corporate breadmakers came along - the people simply decided they would prefer to get an inferior product at a lower price.
The reality is most people don't want to spend more money for higher quality goods. Or, if they do, it's on a limited set of goods based on personal preference.
I see another comment like this one, so here I will respond to both. I've known quite a lot of rich people, all vastly richer than ourselves. As for us, we are so rich we don't think we can financially justify spending more on cars than my 23 yo pickup and my wife's 8 yo Prius. Our house in an astoundingly banal suburb is worth ~$300K. We can't afford to retire to a cool US city. I find it hilarious that SWEs posting on HN think paying $8 for a loaf of great bread means you are "rich".
As for those rich people, they generally have atrocious taste. They will drop big bucks on high priced wine, or more generally, restaurants. They stay at resorts on vacation and fly business class. We do go to Paris, and stay in a cheap AirBnB out in the 19th, and we fly steerage. We make most of our meals in the AirBnB, and... wait for it... eat food out of artisan vendors. I don't think we've ever spent more than $150 for a restaurant meal in the EU and most of the time it is less than $50. Those rich people we know would neverever spend the time to go to a great bakery. Why would they? That would take time mingling with the plebes, and
who cares? Bread is bread. Impossible to play the status game on that.
The problem with the economics of artisan products is that the number of people, income immaterial, who would go out of their way to spend more on an apex product is, economically speaking, a set of measure zero. Low bid rules our world. This is the reason that at scale corporate chains produce the shit that they do, because that shit industrial product is lower cost and nearly everyone prefers that.
Ever stop to think that the fancy restaurants they're going to are using these artisan bakers? The vast majority of high-end restaurants are not baking their own bread or doing their own pastries. They're outsourcing them because of the sheer amount of space you need to do that sort of specialized work.
I don't think that's right, but I could be wrong here as I have no data.
The problem I see is volume. Once an "artisan" baker is running an operation scaled up to likely more than one restaurant, how do they remain artisan? Why doesn't Baumol's cost disease apply?
