Consumers have enough parameters to optimize for: price of groceries, cost of delivery, fair trade, availability of products, delivery speed, convenience, availability of delivery slots, the list is long.
Consumers are relatively good at optimizing for cost, not perfect -- but asking for more than that is unrealistic.
Personal responsibility is required in a good society, irrespective of the system of government or the level of regulation that currently exists. Even if it's consumers/voters pushing their legislators to build regulations, you need a mass of regular old people who care in order to change a society.
Then the onus is on you to prove that regulation of an issue--say, drinking and driving--didn't just happen to coincide with a national education campaign coming from a well-funded 501(3)(c). Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not so much.
In my opinion, the problem here isn't regulation vs. collective action people like grand-OP who are willing to continue using the service. Those same people will push back against legislation if they believe it will increase their prices, or eliminate the service altogether (Uber/Lyft in e.g. Austin?)
And in any case, consumer-driven action is MUCH faster than regulation. You can boycott them TODAY and cause an actual hit to their bottom line.
However, laws and independent bodies specifically created for the purpose of regulating industry and researching consumer effects are much better than people at finding out the broad effects of company practices. They are specifically reviewing and analysing company practices and making targeted recommendations on effective regulation.
For me, relying on consumer driven action is ineffective, it certainly should be a part of any society, but with the pace of society today, you can't rely on people to be able to have the time, information and energy to vote with their wallets - especially when it often hurts their wallet to do so. Governments and independent bodies have to lead the way with the support of people. I'm painfully aware of being privileged with the time and wealth to be able to vote with my wallet, but I think the majority of people have neither for most of these boycotts.
I'm constantly reminded of a short blurb/study-abstract I read a little while back that found the chief determinant of whether people perceived the taxes they paid were 'fair' was perceived compliance of everyone else. That is, it was more important that everyone else was paying whatever their fair share was, than exactly what my own particular rate is.
Thus you can get people to vote for things that might hurt them a little, that they wouldn't do on their own, as long as they know that everybody else will fairly share in the burden.
But it's a great way to put the onus on the consumer and not blame the cause - the government or multinational.
EU or US regulation on the other hand could probably have Nestle ceasing that practice in days.
There is litterally no other way to have a democraty that to make your day to day actions matter. Each citizen has to have a life directed to create a society.
Now I understand how hard it is. And I don't blame people for failing at it, me included. But as long as we label it as unrealistic, it stops all hope of progress.
No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.
That's always the case. If you recycle, you are at a competitive disadvantaged compared to people who don't care. If you are veggie as well. Or if you help your kids to do their homework.
Do you think it's unreasonable to promote recycling ?
It's not a binary choice, it's a spectrum anyway.
> No, regulation has the possibility of leveling the playing field and making everyone behave in a certain way, irrespective of how good or bad they are.
Regulations are very slow, subject to intense lobbying and conflicts of interest, and assume people in charge are benevolent and compentent.
Regulations are not the base of the society. They come, they go. They change according to the time, the context, the place... People are what's matter.
Again, I understand how hard this is. I also notice that a lot of people don't want to hear about it, because of the resonsibility it involves. But power to the people cannot comes without responsability to the people.
And responsability only truely work if it's chosen, not enforced.
Calling for personal responsibility is a good way to misdirect attention.
The instacart topic is just an example. An example saying, "if your economic system is currently capitalistic, and based on money, then voting with your wallet makes sense".
> I understand that it's hard, but try to imagine
That's so condescending.
> a world where workers can demand a living wage and not have to rely on the generosity of "good people" for the right to live.
Life is not binary, you can work on both. But your solution delegate the action to a small 3rd party, so it's still an oligarchy.
Learning to empower one's self is a skill we could benefit from teaching in society. Unfortunately, our primary education systems are not oriented toward teaching autonomy. They teach independence & compliance, which is false separation (since we're interdependent, not independent) and giving up power to others, respectively.
We hire people to grow our food because it is a better optimisation of labour, not because we can just forget about the process of growing food. We need to be aware of things like: is this food processing sanitary, is the farm run by ethics that we agree with, is the environmental impact acceptable, is this food then best thing to grow in this environment (eg: growing cotton and rice in the desert makes no sense at all).
We then exercise choice by hiring people who best match our criteria.
When the only criteria we filter by is cost, we throw everything else out the window: ethics, ecological sustainability, economic viability, morality, food safety: everything.
Regardless of whether it is a good or bad practice to rely upon, in any capacity, the moral action of consumers generally, the fact still remains for the individual that if they have learned a provider they are using is acting immorally, they have a choice to contribute to and reward that or not. Even if it is terrible to rely upon this on a social scale, it does not absolve you of moral culpability for your own actions. Everything else aside, if you know such a thing, you still made the choice to contribute to a thing you claim to not agree with. It creates a bit of dissonance, where your professed moral beliefs are not reflected in your actions. And that's something that plays a role in your own evaluation of self even if others don't learn of your actions and judge you for them.
People are entitled to their individual choices. If it's too much information to process, they can individually choose someone they delegate their decision making to. One way they do this is to trust a particular certification and only buy products with the certification seal. But each individual should get to choose which party plays the role of delegate for them.
Resorting to one-size-fits-all regulatory/union monopolies shows a lack of imagination that deprives individuals of their agency and breeds corruption/rent-seeking-behaviour.
As for this case, it's pretty clearly theft, and should be dealt with accordingly by the legal system. Customers/workers shouldn't have to band together to punish theft.
Even in tech you have paper CCNA who don't know anything, but have a piece of paper saying they're certified.
You're also saying in this case it is theft, and should be handled by the legal system, which in part is legislated by labor regulations.
1. https://www.fda.gov/AboutFDA/History/ProductRegulation/ucm13...
There's nothing that makes giving an entity like a union or regulatory agency a monopoly that makes it more competent. There's no advantage in monopolizing a market under one quality assessor.
We essentially did that with credit ratings, by creating a special class of credit ratings agencies, that only three firms fall under, and making regulatory requirements requiring participants to receive a passing rating from one of them to be allowed to engage in various market activities.
The result in a non-competitive credit ratings industry with profit margins of approximately 40%, meaning they're extracting a massive amount of economic rent.
>>You're also saying in this case it is theft, and should be handled by the legal system, which in part is legislated by labor regulations.
I'm not endorsing those aspects of the legal system that prohibit contractually agreed terms. Only tort should be punished by the legal system.
