We didn’t buy a pig*
Saturday, 3 January 2009
The lichens and mosses are very happy to soak up our winter rains.
We walked to the Saturday organic farmer’s market (with real farmers, even if they use hydroponics and greenhouses) this morning, and I lost count of the houses we passed with “for sale” signs in front of them….
The common technical term for this kind of market is the (weekly—or similar; periodicity varies) periodic market. They concentrate marketing, and are perfect if the vendors or buyers have to invest considerable travel time to reach the marketplace. Traditional market systems feature periodic markets, which allow vendors to be part-time or small-scale. In areas where most market activity is conducted at periodic markets, the market day rotates among major communities/market locations across a region.
Personally, I think periodic markets are pretty darned interesting when you think about their origins and development…. Bunching up trading is advantageous in multiple ways: e.g., it’s easier to tax by spatially and temporally bunching market activities, it’s safer for participants, it frees everyone for non-market activities (especially production) on the intervening days, it allows different communities to have markets with no simultaneous competitor in the immediate area.
* Apologies; this refers to the Mother Goose nursery rhyme: “To market, to market, to buy a fat pig…“.