Comment by rlpb
20 days ago
> It's the greed at topest level.
You say this as if it's some deviant behaviour that needs correcting.
But greed is normal and expected in a free market economy. Suppliers are expected to seek to reduce their costs and maximise their profits.
> greed is normal and expected in a free market economy
OK, technically true, just like saying "water flows downhill" when someone's house is flooding. It isn't productive, the fact is well known.
"The system incentivizes this" and "this is good/bad" are two entirely different statements. One doesn't address the other [1], until you make a moral judgement about the outcome.
> You say this as if it's some deviant behaviour that needs correcting.
Is it moral and correct for infants to be fed contaminated baby formula? The mismatch between what is and what ought to be is deviance.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem
> It isn't productive, the fact is well known.
I agree. My point is that the original comment was similarly unproductive.
The point of "greed" here is when you are starting to cut corners to make more money to the point of impacting the quality/safety/honesty of your product. Thinking that no one would notice.
You could buy whatever random Chinese milk powder brand. But Nestle is advertising itself on the upmost quality and care for you kids. Especially the brand impacted.
It's like going to a restaurant selling the best homemade luxury food and you go to the kitchen and you find that they cook expired supermarket frozen food because they greedily were thinking that it would be more profitable.
So you're insinuating that importing from China automatically means poor quality? I don't believe that's true, especially for large companies who are able to manage the supply chain (as, AIUI, doing business with China famously requires).
I think you need to address that to validate your original comment. Otherwise there's no justification for your claim.
Uk, France and European product are big historical producers of dairy products. So you can't tell me that ingredients have to be imported from China because they are not available locally, or because China would provide a better quality for them... And the proof that it is not the case is that indeed the contaminated ingredients are coming from China.
The point is that somehow someone made the decision that there was a few cents of benefit to make to outsource the sourcing in China despite the risk, the environmental impact and the violation of customer trust about the safety of the product.
Greed as a concept covers multiple ideas. One is principled self interest like you would see in an objectivist manifesto. The other is un-principled, short sighted, and stupid greed that simply grabs whatever gains they can without thinking about future consequences.
I believe that Nestle epitomizes the latter.