You hit the nail on the head exactly here. People are very good at maximizing their short term situation, even at the detriment to their community. A good example is people who travel to nearby cities to buy things because they have lower taxes. They don't seem to understand that (for the most part), taxes in their own city benefit their city. Taxes they pay to a neighboring city don't benefit them or their neighbors.
How is it to our long term benefit to continue paying more for goods forever? Maybe we’re just better off in a world where industries that have severe economies of scale like retail get consumed by the big guys so we all save money, and small businesses keep fixing the pipes, designing our graphics, etc.
Economies of scale are better in almost every way, if the benefits of economies of scale are somewhat evenly distributed, and that the benefits don't come with significant negatives somewhere else.
However, most of the time, the majority of the benefits of economies of scale tend to go to the wealthy. The small amount of benefits that do go to consumers/people make them think that they are the beneficiaries, and often the societal cost is masked.
Some have some economies of scale but not severe and service or quality or other things matter and there you usually find big businesses and small competing with each other. (I work in the packaged food world, it falls into this category.)
And some, like retail, have such large economies of scale that a small business just can’t really compete. In the case of retail, this is largely because of logistics being such a big portion of cost of goods.
They usually understand that perfectly well, but understanding that doesn't mean that they should not rationally try to minimize the taxes that they personally pay. The ideal scenario for any individual A is that A pays as little in taxes as possible and all A's neighbors pay as much as necessary to fund the government programs which A benefits from. For A, intentionally shopping locally in order to pay higher but local taxes is against their own rational self interest.
Policy shouldn't be designed to only work for the collective good if every individual works against their own self interest—any policy designed that way is doomed to failure from the get go.
One of the biggest socialist programs of wealth redistribution in the US is actually our highway and road system, where we pay hundreds of billions of dollars from cities to smaller municipalities and counties to maintain a system of public roadways by which those smaller municipalities can reach larger cities by car. Absolutely nobody complains about that. So clearly paying taxes on that is beneficial. And that suggests that paying taxes on other things is beneficial.
But my point is that it's not. It's in your interest to have those things but not in your interest to pay for them. Having government programs such as roads is beneficial. Paying for roads out of your own pocket is not. So we should expect to see people dodge taxes wherever it's practical to do so.
This has implications for how you design a taxation system. For example, there is an optimal sales tax rate that is neither significantly lower than your neighbors nor significantly higher—one where the inconvenience of shopping somewhere else is higher than the cost of shopping locally.
The only way to get around the problem is to make receiving the government services contingent on paying the tax. Vehicle registration fees are a good example, as are property taxes. If roads are paid for out of a tax that you can't avoid paying if you own a car, then using the government-provided infrastructure is contingent on paying for it and it's in your self interest to do so.
Sales taxes are particularly problematic in this regard because the people who pay them are often not the people who benefit from the programs paid for. (Though this is less true in small isolated towns than it is in large Metro areas.)
This is entirely a matter of opinion whether you believe that a democratic process should be able to direct individuals' funds to public works projects or not. I believe that it is. But when you assert one way or the other you're challenging an axiom.
So sure you could completely redesign the taxation system, or you could work with people to convince them that paying taxes actually confers benefits.
Alternatively, many may understand that claim, but disagree with it.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but if not then the shipping market is just completely broken and begging for disruption.
In the case of shipping, I'm not an expert but I do know a few of them:
* The amount of time per mile a human needs to spend handling that shipping container is lower, because there are only a few very long legs rather than many transfers.
* The amount of time per pound of goods a human has to spend handling the shipping container is much lower, because the container is moved all at once, where your cubic-foot package has to be handled individually.
* The fuel cost per pound of goods per mile is lower with the shipping container because it is usually transported by boat and train, which are far more efficient than the trucks used in last-mile delivery.
This also applies to endless other real world things and services. Prices for so many things are completely out of touch with reasonably approachable costs, yet there's no Elon in shipping or these zillion other broken industries that, if fixed, could really reshape and perhaps even revitalize the American economy.
This is quite literally, one of the benefits people are referencing when doing commerce in large quantities when they mention “economy of scale”.
In computer science terms the shipping containers are like bits. They either exist or they don’t. If you want something with more precision like an integer or a float, you can make it happen, but it’s more costly in terms of resources
When it comes down to it, most people would rather save money and pay less than shop at small businesses.
On a note about radio: it's dead. If you want a local radio feel, listen to podcasts. Stephen King most likely is losing advertisers because radio, as a medium, is getting overtaken by podcasts and things like Youtube.
I used to listen to the radio every day and I haven't been a regular listener for almost a decade.