So there isn't a large enough market in your area for a "real" electronics store - that means you are in the wrong place if you want to buy a breadboard in person, not that there is a problem with the free market.
Do you really think there are too few people that want to buy a breadboard in Boston that the store would take a loss on having a few in stock? I think it's just not "profitable enough" for them.
What I said was that the fanboys claim that the free market will utilize every opportunity of profit, and I'm claiming that's not borne out by experience.
> What I said was that the fanboys claim that the free market will utilize every opportunity of profit, and I'm claiming that's not borne out by experience.
Strawman. The claim is that folks will try to find profitable things. That doesn't imply that they'll tolerate, let alone prefer less profitable things. (It also doesn't imply that everything profitable has been found.)
If you think that there's good money to be made on breadboards in Boston, go for it.
What? Your beef is that someone else isn't catering to something that you don't value enough for them to make money? If you don't think that breadboards are worth much, why should anyone else?
"What I said was that the fanboys claim that the free market will utilize every opportunity of profit, and I'm claiming that's not borne out by experience."
No, the fanboys don't say that. The "fanboys" say what arethuza said.
Fanboys might also say something along the lines of "If you're so sure there's a profit opportunity here, why not try it and capture it?" Now, I'm actually not seriously suggesting that you do that, but I am seriously suggesting that if you were to try it, you may discover that there are indeed good reasons they don't have them. I've seen any number of "boutique" stores start up under your philosophy, and from what I've seen it's a very, very dangerous mindset to start up a business in.
I think the real reason people don't like capitalism is that it tends to let the cold, hard underlying reality actually impact your business, and force you to adapt to the world instead of the other way around. (And when I see companies do that in a putatively "capitalistic" environment, I'm the first to say that it's no longer capitalism.) A lot of people have a deep resistance to that idea, but I think it's at the core of why capitalism succeeds so well; the success of your system will be pretty directly proportionate to its ability to deal with reality and not fantasy, and some non-capitalistic systems can at least survive... though, well, let's talk about that again after the entitlements (aka "the fantasy that I can be promised unconditionally safe money in the future by the government today"; there is no such thing as unconditionally safe future money) are done crashing. (Yes, the US has entitlements; to that extent it isn't very capitalistic.)
Have you tried, say, Radio Shack? It depends on the store, but I know at least one of them in Rochester stocks breadboards and basic components. If you need something less common or you don't want to pay the Radio Shack premium, might I suggest DigiKey.com?
