Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

powercow t1_j49gqw2 wrote

sure it does, you still got to eat, thats more demand. Because i bought more tomatoes than I needed and threw some out and went to buy more, that was more tomato demand than if i bought just the right amount. That definitely does effect price.

26

DrZoidberg- t1_j49n9tw wrote

Also economically less work has to be put into making whatever you're throwing away. Less work means less overhead means lower prices

6

Content_Flamingo_583 t1_j4a9t0x wrote

If you buy less of a company’s product, that company just produces less of it for sale. The price would stay the same.

(The price may even go up, because of a reduction of the economy of scale).

However, you would personally save money by simple virtue of the fact that you’re buying less of the product.

Which is to say, pro tip: You can save money by not wasting food you buy.

9

Content_Flamingo_583 t1_j4a8nit wrote

Increased demand doesn’t always raise price, due to economies of scale, and the fact that the supply can be elastic and adjusted based on demand.

Think about it, if most people who ate tomatoes now stopped eating tomatoes, would the prices of tomatoes go up or down in the long run?

Sure, in the short term there would be a glut, and the price would go down. But then the supply itself would shrink. Tomatoes would become a ‘niche’ vegetable, like an exotic fruit, and the lack of scale would mean that they would be more expensive on the whole.

It’s the same reason why increased demand for novel consumer products like computers or smart phones pushes the price down in the long run. The increased demand results in the production of greater supply, and due to economies of scale, that item becomes cheaper on the whole.

All this is to say, if we all bought half as much food, production would shrink, and the price would effectively stay the same for us at the consumer level.

6