WalMart tells manufacturers what to do, how to do it, and when to do it, in very explicit terms. Ask anyone who sells to WalMart.

"Who tells whom what to do?" - V.I. Lenin

My family runs a business that sells to WalMart and I worked in merchandising in mega-scale retail briefly and this is 98% bull shit that is either done because you've bought whole hog insane narratives or are trying to fit your own. The idea that WalMart tells P&G how to make Tide is laughable.

That would be relevant if WalMart sold only Tide from P&G. I guess they sell more of their own brands, produced by whomever, according to their terms. Similar to what COSTCO has as 'Kirkland', and ALDI/Trader Joe's as theirs, and so on.

> Whenever people describe WalMart or Amazon as centrally planned economies

It's a lucky thing that nobody said that then, or that straw man wouldn't have anything to do. Full work for all straw men!

The author of the comment didn’t quibble about this in their reply nor is my characterization an inordinate one. The author is making a clear comparison between the “central planning” of mega-scale retailers and Gosplan. It’s implied that the comparison is reasonable in that Amazon and WalMart are somehow equivalent to or close to the economy of the USSR or else the comparison itself was self-defeating and therefore wouldn’t have been made. It’s not a straw man at all.

Not to completely disagree but saying distribution is less important than production is a bit like taking apart a machine that has the minimum possible number of parts for operation and deciding some gears are more critical than others, yet if you were to remove any of them the entire machine fails.

Production of goods and services is usually not as difficult as the art of efficiently distributing them. In a capitalist society, needs and wants become essentially the same thing and demands are often more virtual rather than actual as the ultimate demand for everything not being directly consumed is usually to gain more tickets/tokens/coins to potentially be eligible for more future needs/wants. The main beauty of a capitalist system is that it self propagates as there is an inherent or unspoken need for everyone to continue doing something for the system in order to not lose what has been acquired. Other systems do seem to theoretically have the potential for much greater efficiencies but defining one and actioning it are incredibly difficult, often because they are rarely actually planned and those doing the planning do not always have human rights as priority when doing so.

> but saying distribution is less important than production

This isn't something that I said. I said that distribution does not an economy make. I'm demonstrating the extremely limited value of calling Amazon or WalMart an economy by showing that they are not very close to what an economy is. An additional contrast that could be made is that Amazon and WalMart are generally doing extremely minimal investment as well.

Ok I missed where someone had called them economies. Agreed they are not. It’s interesting, the main reason why they exist is our society did not author a better system or one at all really. It’s always been assumed that capital gain is sufficient to ensure distribution.