alt Hacker NewsWho pays for the logistics cost of moving and stocking these products in discount stores and giveaway centers? That is a large percentage of the total cost of production and the reason disposal is cheaper.
If those costs are paid for by taxpayers then the consumers are in effect involuntarily buying products they would not have otherwise bought, just with more steps. We already see this with agricultural subsidies.
If those costs are charged back to the producer then it becomes economically optimal to under-produce, which will cause prices to rise and risk shortages but eliminate waste. One can make the argument that higher prices for basic goods to reduce waste is a social good but it also impoverishes consumers.
All of these scenarios have happened empirically countless times. That almost every producer over-produces to some extent at no profit to themselves when allowed has strong "Chesterton's Fence" characteristics.
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> Who pays for the logistics cost of moving and stocking these products in discount stores and giveaway centers?
All the examples I know of (Austria, Switzerland) are social clubs/associations (whatever that is called) and DO NOT depend on tax payer money.
It's a somewhat blunt instrument used to internalize some externalities: Making a product and then destroying it is wasteful, and the market will fix all internalized costs of that waste, but some of those costs are externalized. Having society pay somewhat for producing clothes that are then worn, that's one thing. Having society pay for pointless waste is another.
What you've said is: Looking only at the internalized costs, pointless-wasting a percentage of clothes costs X but reduces clothes cost in the store by Y, with Y being larger than X.
Okay. Irrelevant - that math doesn't include externalized costs. It may well be that this is a stupid idea, but "market decided destroying some clothes was more efficient" doesn't prove anything unless you can show that the size of the externalized costs to this process are 0 or close enough to 0 to have no meaningful relevance.