About 3% of humans are born psychpaths (roughly: they have no empathy hence only care about themselves).
One would naivelly expect that only caring about yourself would be a winning strategy from a genetics point of view and hence over time the whole of Manking would have become psychopaths as the ones with such a natural advantage were more successful at surviving and reproducing than the others, yet that's not at all the case and only a small fraction of people are born psychopaths.
My personal explanation for that is that psychopathic behaviour is only a genetic advantage if most people around are not that - or, transposed to to economic terms, being a rent-seeker only works if most people are producers and doens't at all work when most people are rent-seekers.
I expect that in our evolutionary past, whenever a tribe/group had too many psychopaths without some kind of mechanism to kick them out or force them into cooperative mode, it eventually collapsed and ended up removed from the genetic pool hence why in millions of years of evolution the supposed superior behaviour of caring only about yourself didn't end up dominating the human genetic pool - the "threading of the needle" for the survival psychopathy as a behavioural trait in the gene pool was a balance between that behaviour expressing itself often enough to reproduce and remain in the gene pool and not so much that there were too many such individuals in a group causing it to collapse.
Not necessarily. That would turn it into something more like a public utility than like a for-profit business.
I mean, it's "not socialism" when the fire department or the power utility aren't private, for-profit corporations, but it is if the grocery store is? LOL
I'll toss in that I'm fine with the luxurious versions of those things being for profit where it applies. But that's the rub, the ruling class is probably going to define anything past a cardboard box and gruel as "luxury."
Since the pandemic I've been working from home and that gives me time to take food-shopping off of my wife's share of the household work. I noticed pretty quickly that every supermarket under the Kroger group was gouging on prices, so when they acquired Safeway I discovered there's a WinCo in my town. (WinCo is employee owned, has the feel of a warehouse/bulk store, and it beats Kroger/Walmart/Amazon/GoodFoodHoldings stores on price, by a lot. Plus, the employees don't have the energy of beaten animals and that matters to me for some reason.)
Good on Chicago doing this but there are already alternatives to Walmart and Whole Foods in some places if you look.
WinCo is legit. The bulk section alone makes going in there worth it. Need oregano? You can pay $5.99 for the jar at Kroger (in my area, Fred Meyer) or you can go to the bulk section of WinCo and pay $0.37.*
* Numbers not exact, but it is literally that drastic a difference.
Yeah. I got a bunch of resealable/airtight bulk containers and will probably never buy spices in those little 2oz shaker-jars again. My pantry is a small store by itself now, it feels better to get like a pound of a spice for $7 than it does to buy 2 ounces at a time for $7- and all those trips I don't have to make to get a spice I just ran out of is totally worth it- my restocking trip is... from kitchen to pantry, takes seconds.
Main streets with Mom and Pop stores are really nice. It seems like you'd get more soul from than a government store. But I don't know how you would incentive then sufficiently, as it's really tough to run a small storefront when competing with online.
The real problem is that we fucked over main streets 75 years ago with deliberately car-dependent zoning policies and massive subsidies for car infrastructure. Now all we're allowed by law to build are shitty stroads with big-box stores.