But why did the food [in England] stay so bad after refrigerated ships, frozen foods and eventually air-freight deliveries of fresh fish and vegetables had become available? … The answer is surely that by the time it became possible for urban Britons to eat decently, they no longer knew the difference. [Since] your typical Englishman, circa, say, 1975, had never had a really good meal, he didn’t demand one. And because consumers didn’t demand good food, they didn’t get it. Even then there were surely some people who would have liked better, just not enough to provide a critical mass.
The history of English food suggests that… a free-market economy can get trapped for an extended period in a bad equilibrium in which good things are not demanded because they have never been supplied, and are not supplied because not enough people demand them.
This is the economist Paul Krugman in an article from the late 1990s called ‘Supply, Demand and English Food’. I don’t agree with the whole article (elsewhere he disparages fish and chips) but his premise is worth exploring. Are there other areas where we accept appalling products or services simply because we have become inured to them? Here, I think, are a few.
Dry cleaners. Over the last 50 years, you’d think someone in the dry-cleaning industry would have come up with a comfortable handle to carry your clean clothes back to your car. As things stand, you can transport dry-cleaning painlessly only if you are a) Abu Hamza or b) a pirate.
London black cab drivers. Yes, I am sympathetic with your plight versus Uber (for reasons I will explain elsewhere), but before you can complain too loudly, you might like to start accepting credit cards.
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