Supermarkets can sell 6 ripe tomatoes for £1 or a pineapple from another country for £1, if you tried to grow those at home (if you even had the correct climate) it would cost a lot more than that. for the location, soil, water, feed, making sure it’s got no pests, etc. How do supermarkets charge so little for stuff that requires so much to mass produce?
In: Economics
You make one sandwich, making that sandwich requires the following steps:
1. Get ingredients out of fridge
2. Apply ingredients to sandwich
3. Put ingredients away
That process takes, roughly, 5 minutes, with step 1 taking 2 minutes (getting out the ingredients), step 2 taking 1 minute (making the sandwich), and step 3 taking 2 minutes (putting everything away/cleaning up).
If you made two sandwiches, it wouldn’t take you 10 minutes to make two sandwiches, it would take you 6 minutes, because step 1 and step 3 would only be done once, but you do step 2 twice, creating 2 sandwiches, meaning that technically, each sandwich only took 3 minutes to make.
If you made 10 sandwiches using this method, it would take you 14 minutes, 2 minutes on each end to take the ingredients out and put them away, and 10 minutes to make each sandwich. Each sandwich, in that instance, took 1 minute and 40 seconds to make.
Now, let’s say you made 100 sandwiches, which would take 104 minutes, meaning each sandwich would take 1 minute and 4 seconds to make.
All of a sudden, a sandwich that took 5 minutes to make, now takes just over a minute to make.
Expand that out to hundreds and thousands of sandwiches, and optimise the time for each step, and all of a sudden you have a sandwich every 5 seconds, not every 5 minutes.
That’s why you can buy tomatoes for a pound and a pineapple for a pound, instead of one geezer growing a pineapple in his back garden for a decade, it was grown with another 100,000 pineapples on a farm.
And here’s another mind bender for you, you know how fruit takes time to ripen? Well, that pineapple probably left the plant completely inedible, and the long time it took to ship via sea cargo actually *ripened the plant in transit* meaning that the farmer didn’t have to sit on it for ages and then get it to you immediately, and the shipping process, in comparison to the cost (opportunity cost) of having them ripen on the plant or ripen in a warehouse, in comparison, actually cost a *negative* amount of money in shipping, because by being shipped, it’s being stored too.
That’s just one small facet of the global supply chain, and why it’s simultaneously amazing, and also stupidly fragile.
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