Who will buy?

And who has no choice but to buy?

Matt Stoller always writes very level-headed reports on competition law matters, but he makes a connection in the referenced article below that had escaped me, and it’s worth reading what he has to say about it.

How to Overturn an Oligarchy

His epiphany for me was the fact that much antitrust discussion circles around the notion of whether or not an amalgamation promotes efficiency in the relevant market. This is the result of a shift that has been engineered over time, since the 1960s, up until when the prime concern in terms of antitrust law was whether or not the relevant market players in a deal were deploying coercion in attaining their goals. What the shift in argumentation before the courts betokens is that coercion is acceptable if the resultant merged entity promotes efficiency.

Coercion is the diametric opposite of consensus ad idem, or, in English, the meeting of the minds, which is vaunted by all and sundry as the justification par excellence for having a law of contract at all. Yet coercion is present in many contractual spheres, from the NDA (non-disclosure agreement—“sign or else”), through standard terms and conditions (“take it or leave it”), to rank anti-competitive behaviour, like price gouging or price fixing. Not only is Stoller’s observation an epiphanic revelation, but it is, on a far wider scale, food for thought.

In the 1968 movie of Lionel Bart’s 1960 musical Oliver!, based on the novel Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, one of the central showpiece numbers is the song Who Will Buy? You can see it as a dewy-eyed vision of Victorian London (which it certainly is) and enjoy it as an entertaining progression of the plot, in which Oliver awakens at his new home in a bed of crisp, clean linen to be greeted by colourful dancing street vendors (which it also is). What the number does as well is present an idealised view of the market, one that many in the commercial marketplace, regardless of what product is being sold, maintain is how markets work.

Down the street comes a single flower girl, who asks, to no one in particular, “Who will buy my sweet, red roses? Two blooms for a penny.” The price is what the girl believes her blooms are worth, juggled with what she needs as income to pay for food to put in her mouth come the evening. And a jug of ale, perhaps, into the bargain. Tomorrow, she will return, with more roses, and her song. It’s the practical application of the prayer Give us this day our daily bread.

In a broad sense, she falls within the category of what are historically known as costermongers. These were originally purveyors of apples, but the term was gradually expanded to mean any street trader. Centuries ago, costermongering was the way in which any goods were sold that were reasonably portable. The first traders to regularly set up shop were paper sellers. Paper is very heavy in quantity, and easily spoiled, so paper sellers preferred to establish themselves in fixed premises, or, as they called them, stationary premises, from which comes the word stationer—a trader who trades from non-moving premises. Traders who wanted to combine a number of different items of a similar type, such a vegetables, or fruit, or flowers, would buy quantities that were ample for several days’ trading and stock them for sale to all-comers, also from non-moving premises. They became known as wholesalers, and also, inspired by the French word grossiste (from gros, meaning large), as grocers.

The trend towards fixed premises for sales outlets was not a natural shift, however. The traders depicted in the movie clip below were forced out of business. They could not afford fixed premises, but were hounded out of the parts of town where fixed premises formed shopping areas, what we call CBDs these days, to whom the costermonger posed formidable competition, since he had no rent to pay as an overhead. Initially, the playing field would be levelled by shopkeepers gaining positions on local authority councils and introducing licence fees for costermongers, or they would bribe the police to pester the costermongers to move on and, over the years, little by little, this form of trading became a rarity. Ironically it is bricks-and-mortar traders who have led the protests against online trading, and perhaps not without justification, but, after all, sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, is it not?

The Pearly Kings and Queens of London, whose costumes are emblazoned with pearl-coloured buttons and sequins, are a remnant of the costermonger tradition. You can see the English comedian Frankie Howerd acting in the part of a latter-day London costermonger in the Ealing comedy The Lady Killers, in which his apple cart gets well and truly upset.

Image: A group of Pearly Kings and Queens collecting for charity at Covent Garden in London, 2008.¹

Back in Oliver!, our flower girl has no influence on the market. Where she has her roses from, we do not learn. Neighbours of ours in my youth had a flower seller come to their door once, with lilac, and Mrs Johnson sent them away, with the words, “I have a beautiful lilac tree of my own.” Only later did she realise that the lilac that had been offered to her at her front door had precisely come from her own lilac bush. So, the lesson quickly learned is that not all traders are honest.

But, aside from the beauty of the girl’s flowers, their presentation in an attractive horticulturalist’s basket, her neat clothing and demure bonnet, and the street cry she sings in those dulcet tones, there is nothing to press home the entire purchase process except persuasion. The song persuades, the presentation persuades, the flowers persuade, the price persuades. All of that persuades Mark Lester to break out into song himself. The first we see of coercion is when The Artful Dodger and Bill Sikes turn up on the green at the end. And Dickens’s clear message is that coercion has no role to play in the depiction of beauty.

1. By Garry Knight - originally posted to Flickr as A Pearly Collection, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5260712.