[IMSAI8080]

There's a book "The People's Republic of Walmart" that makes these arguments. Walmart is a massive company, as large as some entire countries even, that operates an internal economy based on central planning. They tell all their suppliers exactly what will be produced, in what quantities, when it will be delivered and largely what it will cost. Modern stock control systems and supplier integration make it feasible.

[HDThoreaun]

Calling walmart centrally planned is a massive mistake. Walmart is only responding to what its customers want. That is not central planning as it has ever been used to describe an economy. Central planners repeatedly tried to dictate what consumers want. Walmart is quite literally a market, the opposite of centrally planned.

[sudosysgen]

Responding to purchasing decision by downstream consumers is what the USSR tried to. In theory you would buy things, the price would be slightly higher than the cost, and whatever was being bought more would be produced more, with the profit reinvested in trying to make new products and services. In practice organizing the production efficiently was too difficult due to a confluence of a dozen factors.

Point being, responding to consumer demand is indeed what central planning is supposed to do.

[creer]

And in practice, every level that has a say in the central planning - even at Walmart - tries to impose other agendas. What they would like to see more produced and consumed as opposed to what the would be purchaser wants. In Russia it might have been that someone wanted to drain off some money, while they knew some regional admin who wanted their figures to look good, etc up the chain. Result: garbage tractors and not enough of them. In the US, with central planning, gas engines are penalized or electrical ones are pushed - whether you think this is a good reason or not.

At least in the US, if Walmart central planning insists on procuring crappy paper towels, there is a good chance that their competitor Target, literally across the street, is at least ignoring them and perhaps even deliberately exploiting their mistake.

[creer]

Free economy doesn't mean that a business shouldn't try and plan the hell out of things. It means that each business planning process is not the only one around, and all these business are free to have various obsessions (ethical, religious, racist or whatever - none of them traps everyone in), and all these are free to have other blind spots and bugs, etc. They do have bugs. They look for each other's bugs and respond to them.