People
lament the fact that Valentine’s Day is yet another example of a very
‘commercialized holiday.’ In fact, Valentine’s Day is so commercialized that
one’s participation in the holiday is often defined by how much money is spent
on things like cards, candy, dinners, flowers and other extravagant surprises. The
commercial aspect of Valentine’s Day seems to be responsible for all of the bad
parts about the holiday. After all, it’s easy to blame big corporations for
leaving us with empty wallets, a sense of guilt for not buying a gift, and for
emphasizing materialism during a day in which we specifically celebrate
something immaterial. While it is true that creative entrepreneurs are doing
their best to leverage Valentine’s Day into a bigger profit opportunity, big
corporations and commercialized holidays make our lives and our Valentines days
better.
This past Valentine’s Day I needed
to send some roses to my girlfriend in Peru. Delivering the flowers by hand would be extremely
expensive in both monetary and time costs. Luckily, all I had to do was punch
in a sixteen digit VISA number on 1800flowers.com to send flowers to Peru.
Nearly millions of people, who I don’t know or speak the same language as, and
who might not even know each other, were able to deliver roses to a town on the
Amazon River that does not even have a postal code. The best part is this all
worked for only a $27.00 international shipping charge.
My
circumstance highlights the power of market coordination to make the impossible
a possibility. Markets don’t only make sending flowers around the world easy;
nearly every Valentine’s Day gift required extensive coordination of millions
of people. In fact, Entrepreneurs were
planning and organizing capital to make Valentine’s Day celebrations possible
long before the average consumer decided to think about it. Someone was
planting the flowers, ordering ribbon and making chocolates long before
Valentine’s Day even crossed our minds. Even though when we rush to buy
Chocolates right before Valentine’s Day, we might feel frustrated for paying
the full price when we all know that the same item will be heavily discounted
on February 15. However, even the simplest box of chocolates requires thousands
of ingredients and millions of people to produce. Dairy products for the
chocolate itself, plastic for the box, and maybe even some paper for the
wrapping are just a few parts of a basic candy box.
Making
the chocolate requires milk, which came from some kind of farm. On that farm a
farmer managed the production of that milk. Someone else oversaw using that
milk in chocolate production, and yet someone else had to grow the Cocoa
necessary to make the chocolate. A chemist designed the plastic for the box,
and then a packaging engineer had to figure out how shape it like a heart.
While all this was happening, someone was cutting down trees to use for
wrapping paper. An engineer had to design the chainsaw that the workers used to
cut down the trees, and still another person had to grow the coffee beans for
the coffee these workers drink during their breaks. Throughout this whole
process a host of legal experts was most certainly employed to create and negotiate
contracts between all the people contributing to the chocolates, and finally
this legal team had to convince the FDA that the chocolates were fit to eat.
Even though we might not like having to pay
for commercialized products during Valentine’s Day, the alternative seems to be
much worse. I don’t have the knowledge, skill or time to make Chocolates or
prepare Roses. In fact, corporations work so hard to make products that would
ordinarily be out of our productive capacity so easily attainable that without
them getting even a mediocre gift might be impossible. What is even better,
these companies compete with each other to constantly provide us with cheaper
and cheaper prices for things we could never do ourselves.
Though
they might profit in the process, profit seeking entrepreneurs are already
working to make Valentine’s Day possible for next year. The market process is
coordinating millions of people who are peacefully and voluntarily exchanging
services, generating wealth and creating a better Valentine’s Day for everyone.
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