Having lived in Albania during the bring of communism, and having been in similiar lines myself, I can tell you that it was not the price that was the problem.
There was no FOOD!! that was the problem. You either bought the bread, or went to bed starving. It was a period of transition (about few months) that no matter how much money you had, food was hard to find.
The rationing was a result of scarcity. If priced the food such that there were no lines, only the rich would afford it, and the rest would just starve.
Well, guess what? Those starving people eventually would have had it enough, and throw your goverment out sooner than later.
By rationing during hard times, everybody was guaranteed some kind of minimum level of nutrition, and avoided some people hoarding food, while others went to bed hungry.
If priced the food such that there were no lines, only the rich would afford it, and the rest would just starve.
Queuing doesn't solve the problem; it just means that the people at the front of the line survive instead of the rich. (Of course, the rich tend to be so well-connected that they can just bribe the officials for food.)
When food is scarce, the equilibrium price rises. If the government imposes a price ceiling, one effect is queueing. Another effect is a catastrophic undermining of incentives. If food is expensive, sellers will transport it even at great cost in order to reap the profits. The result is that supplies will rise over time, alleviating the shortage and lowering the price. A price ceiling undermines this incentive, guaranteeing that the 'shortage' will persist.
Rationing is intuitively appealing, but it doesn't work. The surest way to avoid starvation in times of great shortage is to let the price system do its work. Conveniently, that's also the right answer when there are no shortages. 'Do nothing' is often politically untenable, though, and as a result harmful market interventions lamentably persist.
if you're arguing that communism is a bad idea I fully agree. But if you're arguing that communist governments should not fix the price of food and this would magically solve the shortage of food you must not be too familiar with communism.
The usual reason for a shortage of food was rampant lying at all levels of the government about how much food was produced in the country. Due to high levels of exports (based on the fictional supply) there was little food to serve the population. Letting the price fluctuate with the market would do nothing unless food could be imported, but imports were also highly regulated at the national level (and the currency had no official exchange rate). I'm speaking here of Romania under communism.
The reason there are line-ups in the short-term is rarely because of the pricing mechanism, but because the degree of control required for effective rationing requires fewer points of distribution. If you could vote at the convenience store, you wouldn't need to line up to vote either....
The supply and demand argument isn't tenable in areas with both inelastic supply and demand. The possible solutions all involve tradeoffs, and there are good and bad ways to implement them. The good news is that rationing doesn't necessarily require price controls, and there are effective and ineffective ways of sending price signals and otherwise encouraging/discouraging production.
My personal preference is subsidization for the poor - an approach which prices scarcity by trading cash for convenience. Telling the starving that a big of hunger is good for them in the long-run is silly. A bit like arguing the Great Depression was nothing more than a purge of rottenness from the system. When all the banks have collapsed we'll all be better off!
If food is expensive, sellers will transport it even at great cost in order to reap the profits
Maybe too general of a statement to draw any definitive conclusions; it's really interesting how the cost of transport is a major underlying factor which is often overlooked, especially for food. However, the economic realities surrounding food are very different from those surrounding coffee.
Rather an issue of supply and demand, the demand for food seems to be becoming more of a distribution issue than a supply issue. Doesn't the US have more obese people than just about everywhere else? And even without modern technology and "globalization", demand for food (or coffee, for that matter) could easily be a distribution issue at the local level, evidenced by the OP. The opposite of globalization is localization.
The parent RE: "The Perils of Free Coffee" . . . for coffee (the only US state that grows coffee is Hawaii, afaik, which is quite interesting considering how much of the stuff Americans drink), the transport/distribution issues would indeed be pretty relevant. But again, at the expense of what? Starbucks' promotional hype for the hope of getting more people in general hooked on coffee being > the minor irritation of its self-proclaimed loyal customers?
From the OP: "Here I was, a loyal customer willing to pay good money for a product similar to the one they’re handing out for free, and they didn’t want my business." And then: "As it happened, there was a Dunkin’ Donuts nearby, but since I dislike DD coffee, I made my walk with no coffee whatsoever."
I once visited Morocco, and one bus company offers passage on either of two identical buses at different prices. The more expensive bus is just less crowded.
Here in Ottawa, we have express busses that service the exact same route that the regular busses do in some areas. I found it worthwhile to get an express pass ($20 more / month) simply because you'd be guaranteed a seat on the express bus and guaranteed to stand on the regular bus.
Also, I don't know how uncommon that perfect storm is. Isn't one of Starbucks' primary products convenience? They're all over the place so that it's always really easy to change your plans to include a "Stop in at Starbucks" step. So, not that they've targeted DD for overflow pick-up, but they've positioned themselves so that whenever someone is thinking they might want some coffee and wherever they're standing doesn't have it, they don't have to go far. DD just needs to keep from being a place like that.
