Humans are fucked. For the most part, we’re a bunch of bumbling apes unable to control our basic instincts for survival and sex. Finding a way for these selfish idiots to organize themselves into a civilization with minimal violence and maximum happiness is an extremely violent and unhappy process. Perhaps the prominent model for organizing these animals in the west in the 21st century is known as “capitalism”. Basically it embraces humans selfish nature for a never ending supply of food, status and ever shinier objects.
Imagine you want more money (a likely assumption if you’re a homo sapien) and when you talk to your friends you consistently notice they hate cooking, grocery shopping, choosing restaurants and sitting in restaurants waiting for their food to arrive. Basically you notice that they’re lazy little shits without an easy way to get food that they want to their door quickly. You think that if enough other people shared this mentality and were provided with a way to get food delivered to their door quickly and conveniently there could be lots of money to be made there.
You have some money saved up so you decide to pay someone to develop an app where people could browse the menus of several restaurants in their area. Customers would of course pay more per order compared to sitting in the restaurant in exchange for the convenience of not needing to leave their house. You contact 100 local restaurants with your idea telling them that if they participated in your business they would get a cut of each order and your new business would keep the rest of the surplus. Most are skeptical if this new model will be worth their time but 25 restaurants are on board so you get their menus integrated into your app so all the menus are in one convenient location. You make sure everything takes as few taps as possible so customers don’t get bogged down with unnecessary complexity. You hire one more person as a delivery person. You and your developer will also do some of the delivering.
You tell all your friends about the app and aggressively promote it on all the social media outlets available to you. At first mostly out of a feeling of peer pressure your friends try the app and they like it the interface but they think the prices are too expensive. Your app will charge a salad for $18 when they know they could go to the restaurant and get it for $10. You decide to lower your prices by about 15% so that salad is now $15. Your friends are much happier with that price and with that new price you’re even now getting a few people who you don’t know using the app.
After a few weeks word has spread to people even outside the area where you’re able to deliver so you hire two more people with the money you’re making that will service further out areas.
Keep going…. This example is probably too complicated lol
Basic points to illustrate are that the prices are determined by the market. Like if you sell something for too much then you’ll lower your prices to try to get more customers and make more money. But you can’t sell for less than it costs you because otherwise you’ll lose money and the business will die.
Also the system is that individuals and businesses own and control the production and distribution of goods services (sentence plagiarized from chatgpt lol). People are free to buy and sell anything. Competition will change how much things cost. That kind of thing.