market day

a wednesday wander

Every time I come back to Singapore, I’m amazed the wet markets are still there. On one level, they’re a rare inefficiency on a very efficient island, waiting to be rationalized out of existence. You often see 5 or 6 competing fishmongers within spitting distance of each other, and it’s sort of a miracle that all this redundancy still exists.

On another level, they’re a highly efficient form – each is an endpoint of a highly parallelized supply chain (albeit with a few chokepoints), optimized for very high turnover, often holding almost no inventory. Thousands of distributors and wholesalers service thousands more individual stallholders, creating almost perfect competition. And because the businesses are so small, they have minimal overhead and, for the most part, no employees, which means they’re actually a pretty good vehicle for getting food into the marketplace without too much of a markup, while also making people who would otherwise be employees into business owners.

Of course, the whole system is underpinned by government price controls on food and rent (the government is the landlord for wet markets, and rents for stalls have historically been controlled). Since the stallholders have little pricing power due to competition, one could argue that they’re functioning less as business owners than as quasi-public servants, logistics workers keeping the country fed.