Comment by dathinab
8 hours ago
this might cause major financial damage to "traditional local markets"(1) and similar in Berlin and Brandenburg close to it (depending on what kind of potatoes this are, like quality, taste, how the cook (hard, soft), etc.)
(1): Kinda a bit like local farmer markets, but also very different.
the problem isn't the giving away stuff for free part
but the scale of it
I mean giving free stuff to people in need is always grate, irrelevant of scale.
Giving it to people which can easily afford it on small scale is just fine too.
Giving it to people which can easily afford it on gigantic scale and it's only slightly hurting the bottom line of some huge cooperation, then who cares.
But giving away a product people might have bought from smaller local businesses in very larger amounts (more then what such small 1-2 person businesses sell in multiple month), that is where your "charitable" action might cost people their job and you might do far more harm then good.
now Germans are picky about their potato and the chance that 4k Tons of free potato are the kind of potato you find in "local traditional markets" is pretty slim. So this might all just be very hypothetical.
They are giving this away in portions of 1t, which isn't practical for normal consumers (unless they manage to pool somehow), so this won't have much of an effect on the normal consumer market. It's mostly directed at aid organizations, social stuff etc.
From the original pages FAQ:
> Wie viele Kartoffeln bekomme ich?
> Jede Abnahmestelle erhält ca. 1 Tonne (1.000 kg) Kartoffeln.
That FAQ is directed at organizations willing to act as a _distribution point_. So mostly charities who think they can spare the time and effort. I guess a better written FAQ would put it "Wie viele Kartoffeln bekommen _wir_?", making it more visible that it's directed at organizations. I just sampled a few of the distribution points already acknowledged and those do look like they will be passing them on to individual consumers.
thanks