a letter to the editor; a letter to you

This is an open letter to those who want to support their community but 'don't have time'.
Just shop locally – as often as you can.
Every healthy community needs a healthy local economy.

Here's some context.
I'm convinced that Coles and Woolies/Safeway do indeed practise anti-competitive behaviour and that a grocery duopoly - often spawning local monopolies - is not healthy for the end-user nor for local communities.

The nature of capitalism being what it is, what else can we expect?

If, say, the local Safeway uses its purchasing power and economies of scale to start a price war against an independent supermarket OR greengrocer OR butcher OR service station, the attack can only succeed if consumers support them.

Many of us do indeed transfer our 'spend' away from locally-owned businesses: if these can't 'compete' (in what I consider to be unbalanced fight), they're gone.
Your average small independent greengrocer, for example, normally doesn't buy and sell (frequently export-subsidized) produce from Europe or North America, as the Big Two do.
Nor does your local independent refrigerate its stock for months and market itself as 'The Fresh Food People'.
Nor can a small business exert pressure on (often Australian) suppliers to force shelf prices down, or push a growing range of 'home (generic) brands' - keeping any (arguable) 'competition' within a single store.

That said, an increasing number of us don't jump ship.
We recognise that it's often worth paying an extra 10 or 15% for groceries if it means sustaining a business which, in turn, spends most its money - business inputs, sponsorships and profits - locally, rather than 'exporting' its spend to farmers and factories in Italy or China and profits to shareholders across the globe.

How many of us, driven by the savings, abandon their local hardware or nursery and scurry off to Bunnings every Saturday?
How many get their business stationery and equipment from Officeworks rather than 'the local bloke'?
Similarly, fast food from the corporates? Clothing from Target or DFO? Books from Amazon?

At the end of the day, it's our choice - and that's capitalism; that's 'democracy'.
But we shouldn't complain about the consequences unless we, as consumers, are prepared to do something about it.

what's the real cost of the mythical 'free' market?

I'd be the first to admit that, as a general rule of thumb, you can't change human nature.
Example. There's nothing wrong with communism in its purest sense but as applied, historically, it has too often brought out the worst in humanity: criminality, genocide, elitism and privilege, incompetence, lack of accountability, exploitation, suppression and repression.
Substitute communism with Catholicism or Islam (or any cult you like) and you'll observe a similar phenomenon: the finest altruistic principles corrupted by human opportunism and manipulation.
Another time, I'll look at this phenomenon a little more closely.
Suffice it to say, most communist states have broken down because the vision, in practice hasn't matched the theory – thanks to human nature.
Why? Too many of us don't really believe, in our hearts, that we are no better than everyone else.

A global economy underpinned by the 'principles' of Supply and Demand is humanity's panacea.
Damn! I didn't vote for it but I'm really impressed!
As with most noble precepts, capitalism works - on paper …
Production and consumption increasing in harmony, in equilibrium.
Innovation, excellence and hard work rewarded: wealth for all!
Mutual obligation - so no free rides at society's expense.
Productivity and Competition keeping prices down; mediocrity and underperformance penalised.
'Just In Time' management offering efficiency gains to benefit the marketplace.
(insert your favourite cliché here)

How much needs to go wrong before our collectively-thick-as-pigshit human nature perceives that the free market is a complete crock?
Six billion of us live in a closed system which can't sustain anything approaching continual growth.
In fact, if we all stopped breeding tomorrow, our manufactured environmental crisis is still inevitable.

When I was in high school 35 years ago, we learnt that a quarter of the world's population lived in poverty.
Thanks to the market, they still do.

As for aspirationalist 'working families' - a favoured tool of the overpaid and largely underworked notional 'left' here in Australia - this term needs to be replaced with 'WORKING POOR'.
REAL workers are being screwed worse than ever.