| Photo: Bruna Frascolla
One of the first things I noticed when I moved from Salvador – a metropolis with 2.9 million inhabitants – to Cachoeira, with its ] thousand spread across headquarters and districts, it was the lack of French bread in the supermarket. In short, this means that there is no such place that you can go and buy everything you need. I thought then that maybe Cachoeira is more similar, in this respect, to the idea of the city that humanity had for most of the time.
Cities stood out from rural areas precisely because of commerce. Concentrating people who lived from non-agricultural activities and received money, it was natural for food to arrive through traders. We can imagine a very primitive beginning in which farmers worked as a tradesman: thus, each one brought a handful of foodstuffs that he thought would be of interest to the men of the city. Here in Cachoeira, it is possible to see the man from the countryside coming on his donkeys and horses with two large baskets on the side, supplying small markets. As the mount is European, it is quite likely that the scene I see here is familiar to Europeans from the Middle Ages until at least the age of the Enlightenment. When they wrote about the urban world – including the wonders of the free market – they certainly had in mind a scenario more like Cachoeira than Salvador. Even when they wrote about the wonders of the free market.
Pedestrian life and decentralized purchases2022
Over time, I learned that each supermarket and grocery store have their supplier. If I liked the guava biscuit that comes from a certain Povoado de Onça (according to the fine print on the label), there is no point in looking for them at establishments X, Y and Z, as I know I can only find W. of Bahian beekeepers with an address in the rural area of Palmas do Monte Alto arrives at a supermarket in São Félix, but not at the grocery store where I buy the cookies from Povoado de Onça. Coconut water bottled in Santo Antônio de Jesus appears in restaurants and in the cold cuts area of some markets (My biggest surprise was to see that my jug of milk bought in a supermarket in Cachoeira came from Poland. As I noticed that the porcelain from the west of the Paraná is very well distributed around here, I suppose the Polish jar made a stopover in the land of Paraná relatives before heading north).
The supermarket that sells frozen fish rarely sells trays of frozen chicken. The supermarket that sells them also sells frozen loose pieces from a slaughterhouse in Feira de Santana. But you buy fresh pieces in a chicken box at the Municipal Market. The guava biscuit market sells fresh beef, but only third-party beef, for stews.
As for bread, it is just as effective to look for it in a grocery store or supermarket as it is in a clothing store. Bread place is at the bakery. In it we find things that accompany breakfast – namely, butter, milk, coffee – or that are related to bread, such as bread and wheat biscuits. Some bakeries evolve into delicatessens or snack bars.
As you may have guessed, I do the shopping in pinga-pinga. One little thing in one market, another in another. So, I’m able to go out carrying the groceries. As for the danger of out of control spending, the payment method solves it: just withdraw a relevant amount of money and see how long it lasts. The locals will never open their mouths to say that the city is safe, because they compare the waterfall of today to the waterfall of ten years ago. Their practices are more informative than their words. Here people walk around with money, while in the metropolis it would be crazy.
The car, violence and monopolies
How are middle-class shopping carried out in big cities? You take a car and go to the supermarket to do “the month’s purchases”, which are packed in your suitcase and paid for with your card. The customer probably went to a supermarket belonging to a supermarket chain, which means that he can cross the metropolis and find the same prices. To make matters worse, he may have gone to supermarket chains with different names, but which actually belong to a foreign chain that went out to buy several national chains, such as Walmart and Cencosud. In other words: in our act of leaving home to buy “everything”, we end up favoring monopolies.
Of course, shopping on a drip in most cities is difficult. You would need to take the car and take care of the parking lot several times; or, if you’re one of those rare middle-class people who believe in public transport, you’d have to pay multiple tickets. The price of the tickets would not compensate for the displacement for small purchases. In addition, the cost of commuting in metropolises is not limited to money: time is also an issue, due to traffic jams.
In the payment method, a third party bites the money. She is the machine operator. In practice, violence makes us pay a tax to companies like PagSeguro. This also seems to be a sector prone to the formation of monopolies.
But if that everything is visible in the physical difference between cities, things reach stratospheric levels with the internet. Stores like Amazon actually claim that we can find EVERYTHING in them. On Amazon in the United States, which started out selling books, you can even find French bread.
Is it not the case to think that the lifestyle of the metropolises favors the formation of monopolies?
The Producers2022
Another scene I see in Cachoeira and it must be the same as in Europe in the past is the farmer who goes to the fair to sell his surplus. He plants first for himself, he must have dealings with neighbors who produce different things in order to make exchanges, and he takes the surplus to the surroundings of the fair. Arrange the roots and vegetables in small piles. You can buy the mounds; there is no scale, nor the possibility of picking up less than a heap. The idea is to return home with as little load as possible. It doesn’t matter to accumulate, because everything is perishable.
What I want to note there is the lack of specialization of the small producer. This even explains the diversity of retail shelves. If an individual leaves the countryside to sell his varied and modest surplus to one or two grocers, it is natural for each grocer to have a unique combination of products.
It is clear that the butcher who boasts about the smoked meat he produces with his own pigs will not be able to supply supermarkets or large exporters . For these, only agribusiness and technological agriculture, which have specialized and large-scale production.
Thus, there is a tendency on both the seller and the producer side (and even the payment method) towards a great concentration. And it’s good to keep this in mind when reading classic writings on economics, because the reality we live in today is very different from that in which the great thinkers lived.
