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Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

jefftk.com

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Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#141

Post by roel_v »

sneak wrote: post #37
gegtik wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just invented grocery stores

No. Everyone in my vicinity buys their non-restaurant food from 2-3 grocery stores. I am talking about having the community's food supply be provided by more suppliers, and each other, p2p style. Perhaps a data-driven "farmer's market" style setup. Distributed, not just hub-and-spoke decentralized. We just watched the failure mode of that one.

That's not how any of that works nowadays. How do you deal with agricultural commodities futures in such a model, the 'flip side' of which (crop insurance) is central to businesses in certain commodities? Sure you can say 'that whole system is broken and we need to go back to how it was before the Green Revolution', but that's just ignoring all the other changes we've seen in agriculture since then, and which are all subtly interlinked (like, do we want to go back to a system where double-digit percentages of the population work in agriculture? Can we?)

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#142

Post by sneak »

XorNot wrote: post #52
sneak wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Everyone in my vicinity buys their non-restaurant food from 2-3 grocery stores. I am talking about having the community's food supply be provided by more suppliers, and each other, p2p style. Perhaps a data-driven "farmer's market" style setup. Distributed, not just hub-and-spoke decentralized. We just watched the failure mode of that one.

No we didn't, we watched a supply chain shock which could've been prevented if we had some common-sense regulation to require supermarkets and grocery stores to enact purchasing limits if their demand curves start behaving anomalously. Distributed systems in software are hard. Th idea it'll somehow be easier when you need to truck tonnes of physical goods around is wishful thinking - the same failure modes still appl…

A lot of Americans have a truck or two, and a lot of storage space. I think that these events won’t soon be forgotten, and even if nothing more happens than more frequent group flour buys and a lot more slack in the chain happens (e.g. more people with 10kg of flour in the pantry) we’ll be better off.

An uber or craigslist or sia for staple foods would be cool though.

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#143

Post by nullc »

baybal2 wrote: post #89
markdown wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This appears to be rational at first, but it only led to people all rushing to those few supermarkets the moment the convoy arrives, and them being emptied clean by first 50 something people. Wait, they didn't place restrictions on how many items individual customers could buy?

Around fifty people, each buying 2 bag of food, is all that's needed to empty an average load of a 40 feet truck. > Wait, they didn't place restrictions on how many items individual customers could buy? Barely did, and even when it was enforced, this didn't prevent panickers reliably rushing to supermarket all and every time the truck arrived to buy full bag of food, or two. People were literally running after that t…

> this didn't prevent panickers reliably rushing to supermarket all and every time the truck arrived to buy full bag of food

Please don't characterize buying a bag (or two) of food as panicking.

That is less than an ordinary amount of shopping at a time for me during times when there isn't a public health order to avoid going out. And I'm not shopping for half as many people as some people are.

Characterizing the reasonable and prudent behaviors, directly driven by the advice of public health officials as "panic" because it is exposing supply chain limitations is extremely harmful.

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#144

Post by nullc »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #120
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question how many people are actually using the flour they're hoarding, and how many are just putting it in the back of the pantry because, "When the end of the world comes, you'll need flour!" It's very irritating for those of us who actually bake on a regular basis and resisted the temptation to hoard for hoarding's sake.

I present to you this commenter, who just bought 200 lbs of flour. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22885192 Hoarders suck, especially super hoarders like this.

> I do go through a lot of it. My hobby is baking.

Please don't reflexively characterize people who do different things or have different needs as "super hoarders".

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#145

Post by nullc »

ghaff wrote: post #64
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I question how many people are actually using the flour they're hoarding, and how many are just putting it in the back of the pantry because, "When the end of the world comes, you'll need flour!" It's very irritating for those of us who actually bake on a regular basis and resisted the temptation to hoard for hoarding's sake.

Or they intend to bake and when their first try at a sourdough starter fails they give up, in part because at least around where I live there's no shortage of bread (and there hasn't been) in the stores.

> there's no shortage of bread (and there hasn't been) in the stores.

Bread, especially good bread, gets stale kind of quickly. If you want fresh bread right now and don't want to continually go out an expose yourself to infection the only real option is to make it at home.

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#146

Post by nullc »

khazhoux wrote: post #140
ChristianBundy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame that people are learning new things and experimenting with new hobbies to keep themselves busy during quarantine. All change is bad, but especially personal growth. But really though, a family buying 5 pounds of flour isn't the problem, it's the hoarders loading up shopping carts full of toilet paper and flour that give us empty shelves. I think we'd have enough for everyone if we didn't have greedy hoar…

I don't care about people trying a new hobby. That doesn't account for the lack of TP, flour, and now even chips and butter. Like you say: hoarders. Everyone is acting selfishly, and the stores aren't policing purchases enough.

Your claims are not supported by reports from industry experts: https://marker.medium.com/what-everyones-getting-wrong-about...

Our supply chains are optimized to have essentially no slack. When people switch from using the toilet at work to home, and when they buy a month at a time instead of a week at a time in order to comply with shelter in place orders, they drain the grocery stores extremely hard.

No selfish or hoarding behavior is required to produce the effects you're talking about.

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#147

Post by jefftk »

sct202 wrote: post #97
devchix wrote: post #12

> Webstaurant would ship a pallet of flour, 50 bags of 50lbs each, for $1,081 or $0.43/lb. > Unfortunately, between placing the order and them shipping it they ran out of stock Insanity! I'm heartened that people are still baking at home though. For comparison, retail King Arthur All-Purpose flour goes for about $3.69 for 5lbs, or $0.73/lb, so at $0.56/lb Sir Galahad flour is still a bargain. Whole wheat flour has br…

Store brand flour though is only $0.40 / lb (5 lb bag @ $2) so this really only makes sense of you can't obtain flour another way. Once you add in labor of splitting it up and billing everyone it seems like too much effort. Fwiw, it seems like the bread supply recovered very quickly.

Yes, this is much more hassle than just buying flour at the store, but in our experience right now that's not an option.

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#148

Post by ghaff »

nullc wrote: post #145
ghaff wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they intend to bake and when their first try at a sourdough starter fails they give up, in part because at least around where I live there's no shortage of bread (and there hasn't been) in the stores.

> there's no shortage of bread (and there hasn't been) in the stores. Bread, especially good bread, gets stale kind of quickly. If you want fresh bread right now and don't want to continually go out an expose yourself to infection the only real option is to make it at home.

You can slice it and freeze it. Even when I make it myself, I don't go through enough bread (and don't want to) to make it more than once a week or so. So, in my case, it's definitely not about baking fresh bread every day or two.

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#149

Post by toomanybeersies »

davefp wrote: post #34
radec wrote: post #23

Otherwise known as a Food Buying Club. basic idea is you get enough people together to create a wholesale account with a distributor. Get your order and split it up between the members. Hippies and other Frugal people have been doing this forever (in my world forever, I grew up going to them).

Niche hobby communities do this all the time. The mechanical keyboard community wouldn't exist without group buys, they rely on them to hit minimum order quantities from producers of custom keycaps, PCBs, and other manufactured items. These are then shipped to proxy vendors around the world who do last-mile shipping to end users. Homebrew clubs also put in wholesale orders for raw materials like yeast, grain, and hop…

I used to organise the group buys for a homebrew club.

We'd buy over a tonne of grain and probably 10 kg of hops every time. It saved us over 50% of what it would cost at the homebrew shop.

I think my record for cheap brewing using bulk-bought ingredients was about $5 for a 5 gallon keg.

Re: Organizing a Group Buy of Flour

#150

Post by anticsapp »

lokl wrote: post #59
vikoonishmoog wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In East Africa, there are at least two operations that I'm aware of that do this among other things - One Acre Fund ( https://oneacrefund.org/ ), and Apollo Agriculture ( https://www.apolloagriculture.com/ ).

Thanks very much!

also http://pricepally.com
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