Lately I’ve been trying to broaden my range of cooking skills to include not only healthy meals, but different cultures as well. Despite my best intentions I find myself reaching for my heavy, decades-old cookbook on Mediterranean food and last week I chose a recipe with fava beans as the primary ingredient. Beans: easy to find.  They should be sitting next to the kidney beans, lima beans, and garbanzos, I told myself.  After spending well over an hour driving to 3 stores with no luck (including one specialty store) I determined that fava beans were not sitting next to the kidneys and garbanzos. Now, I do sometimes find pleasure in running errands as long as they are productive, but wasting time of this nature is simply irritating. Discouraged but not defeated, I returned home and visited Amazon.com. You can buy everything else on Amazon, right? To my surprise, not one, not three, but FIVE separate vendors were offering fava beans, shipped to arrive on my doorstep in two days, at a similar price to the other types of beans I found in the store. As I quickly checked out online, I thought about just how much of my day-to-day shopping has been replaced by visits to Amazon or another internet vendor. Is my experience typical? How much has Amazon really changed the retail industry?

Besides the growing empty spaces in traditional shopping malls, online retailers have altered the shopping experience in another major way. A few days prior to The Fava Bean Incident, I had listened to the NPR program Planet Money, which seeks to explore a variety of interesting economic questions like “Why is the milk in the back of the supermarket?” The subject of this episode, called “Cat Scam,” was a mom-and-pop business that made cat toys. To make a long story short, the owners of this business discovered that enterprising individuals were buying their product and reselling it on another website for a significant markup. The product was not stocked by this middleman, it was purchased from the mom-and-pop business, marked up and then sent directly to the purchaser, called drop shipping. Although this practice seems questionable, it is legal, alive and well – truly thriving – across internet retailers.  

To step back for a moment, traditional brick-and-mortar stores buy their goods in bulk at a per-unit discount from the manufacturer. Then, thanks to this bulk savings, retailers can mark up the price for sale to the end consumer. The consumer doesn’t mind paying a markup because he or she cannot purchase the good directly from the manufacturer for the same or better price. In other words, the retailer acts as a middleman to transfer the good from the creator to the user and collects a small fee for doing so.

These online middlemen offer the same service, but the added value they provide is dubious at best, though they do claim that they add valuable additional marketing for the products in their virtual store. After all, this particular cat toy could be purchased on Amazon (the largest retailer on the web) for $30. Why would someone want, or need, to buy it on eBay for $50? More to the point, how many of us compare prices across online vendors before making a purchase? Could I have bought fava beans from www.cheapfavabeans.com for less? With my newfound knowledge I spent a bit of time perusing the web to compare the same product between several vendors. Though my diligence was a bit time consuming, it sure beat the hour drive time.

Whether you are looking for something specific, say that belted pea-coat you saw in the latest issue of Vogue or those elusive fava beans, the internet is filled with retailers eager to scratch your itch. Just do your research on the vendor, take the time to shop the product and be careful of that potential and uninvited middleman out there!

Submitted by Keri Gore