[It’s] typical of most products today: the material portion of their costs is small. Thus the question is not the difference between what different parties to the production get paid, but rather who adds value, how much, and where.

This is John Larrivee, assistant professor of economics at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland, on the fair-trade coffee movement, on the Acton Institute site, asking “Why Not Fair-Trade Beer and Cakes?” whose raw material sells for so little compared to the finished product? 

If Starbucks is evil for the vast difference between what growers get paid and what Starbucks receives for its coffee, these other cases [a few cents worth of barley for beer at $3 to $9, $10 of flour for a $300 wedding cake] are worse.

Citing low productivity in coffe-growing countries, he says

The real problem is that in a market with low entry barriers (like agriculture), how much people earn depends upon how society-wide productivity affects the quality of outside opportunities. In the United States, farmers’ standard of living is higher because if the difference between how they can live farming and how they can live with another occupation grows too great, they will pursue other options.

Where there are no options, farmers are stuck.  In addition, “fair trade” prices would draw more producers into the raw-coffee market, driving down prices.  In which case you would have to keep selected, or non-selected, producers out, guild– or labor-union style, limiting beneficiaries arbitrarily.

All for the sake of “social justice” by of a “just price,” when (as late-16th-century Spanish Jesuits Molina and others argued) it’s the market that determines the just price.  In this case, Starbucks makes a better coffee and a better sales pitch and succeeds, vastly expanding the coffee market, to the benefit of coffee producers.  Meanwhile, Caribou and Seattle’s Best have their go at it.  This free-market process

will ultimately support more farmers around the world, and may transfer more funds into those countries than would have been the case in any “fair-exchange” system. These funds will gradually improve productivity in those countries, and do so far more effectively and fairly than any fair-trade program ever could.

Social justice promoters have good motives, but they should consider how the world works before they try to remake it.

Mark Brown’s Sun-Times column, “Cashier’s nightmare doesn’t need to get any more extreme,” is about Jewel-Osco’s unreasonable requirements in a merchandising scheme, one of probably thousands tried daily in stores and store chains around the country. 

Jewel-O has “a misguided program” in place, says Brown.  If you don’t think so, consider the “17-year-old cashier who literally [really?] has nightmares” about doing the wrong thing.  A less sensitive writer would have written, “who claims she has nightmares.”  Did she show them to Brown?

“A 62-year-old [Jewel employee] prays before she goes in to work each day that she’ll remember each time without fail because she’s already messed up twice.”  This is bad?

“If you’re unfamiliar with the source of their anxiety,” says Brown, “you may have missed Sunday’s column [I did] about how Jewel-Osco cashiers are subject to losing their jobs if they fail to call each and every customer’s attention to the Xtreme Value item that is being sold at the register that day.”

“A dedicated, veteran employee” told him about it.  How does he know she’s dedicated? Or how do I know if I didn’t read Sunday’s column? I don’t know.

The deal is, if the checkout man or woman doesn’t make a certain offer, the alert customer gets an item at no cost, and the non-alert checker gets penalized.  Happens enough, they get fired. “Instead of a carrot, there’s a stick,” says Brown, who apparently believes in one but not the other.

“We’re talking about people’s livelihoods, which are being put in jeopardy because somebody is willing to snitch to beat the system out of a dollar-bag of trail mix — the Xtreme Value item this past week,” says Brown, who is clearly caught up in this.

Look, if this were Ma and Pa on the corner, telling Susie Q to remember things or she’s out, he wouldn’t (a) know about it or (b) think it called for a column if he did.  But do companies like Jewel-O ever go out of business, leaving thousands jobless?  If you are going to focus on “a dollar-bag of trail mix,” you are going to miss macro-economics — what governs thousands of jobs and meets needs of thousands of households — completely.

Brown argues against the program in place, quoting the angry checkout people.  Having instituted hundreds of retail-store programs in his career, he is convinced this one’s a loser.  Furthermore, he says the corporate owner may want to cut back on higher-paid employees.  (I can’t imagine that.)

But the killer is that nightmare.  “Last night, it took me an hour to go to sleep,” the 17–year-old told him, “and I woke up in the middle of the night crying because in my nightmare I saw this random man that gave me the you-didn’t-offer-me-the-Xtreme-Value stare. In my dream, this was the last time, and I would be fired because of him.”

Brown asks, “Please don’t add to the nightmare.”  Wait a minute.  A literal nightmare or the other kind?  And where’s that story about competing and staying in business?

May I recommend That Colored Fellow, if only for his opening ‘graf today, with it’s whiplash closing sentence?  I don’t care if he does refer caustically, in the very next sentence, to the “Conservative Echo Chamber.”  Being smart and funny, like charity, covers a multitude of sins.