All Hail the Grocery Store
American grocery stores are an underrated symbol of free market abundance.
If I had one chance to show a medieval peasant the glories of the modern world, I wouldn't take them to a space launch or a science lab. I would take them to a grocery store.
What more could you want to awe the medieval imagination? Ginormous, GMO'd strawberries in January? Check. Fifty different kinds of soup? Check. Whatever the hell this is? You bet. American grocery stores don't just have a shocking abundance of food; they have a variety almost completely unknown to humanity.
Our grocery stores are famously astounding to outsiders—from Mikhail Gorbachev to Venezuelan immigrants like Daniel Di Martino, our grocery stores showcase the bounties available in a free society with free markets.
And never is this abundance more on display than during Thanksgiving.
As the holiday approaches, Americans everywhere will be whipping up their favorite stuffing recipe, cranking open a can of cranberry sauce, and possibly burning down their house in an attempt to deep-fry a whole turkey. And adding to the holiday cheer, not only will they be able to pick from a truly massive range of culinary options, they'll do it much, much less than their parents did.
According to data from The American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural lobbying group, the cost of a Thanksgiving dinner for 10 is down around 21 percent since 1986, when adjusting for inflation. As Marian L. Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, recently pointed out, with increases in typical blue-collar wages, it now takes the average blue-collar worker 2.01 hours to afford a Thanksgiving dinner, while it took the same workers 3.2 hours in 1986.
While inflation has increased the estimated cost of a family Thanksgiving over the past few years, it's still thankfully true that making a ginormous meal for your family and friends is much more affordable for current American workers than in previous generations.
The only thing keeping us from grocery store maximalism—and even better access to cheaper and higher quality goods—are bureaucrats and politicians, who use protectionism and overwrought regulation to prop up favored industries. While municipal governments have attempted to tax us away from soda and booze, politicians in Congress have given billions in subsidies and bailouts to the faltering dairy industry while trying to spike sales of plant-based milk. And perhaps worst of all, last year's devastating baby formula shortage shows just how harmful anti-competition regulations can be.
But despite the ample room for improvement, I can't help but keep loving grocery stores.
When I think about what makes me proudest to be an American—something that fills me with true, cheesy, unadulterated patriotic pride—I think about those aisles and aisles of abundance. And this Thanksgiving, I'm particularly grateful for the, ahem, cornucopia they offer.