[GeneralMaximus]

> ... either people accept the fact that some neighbourhoods are served worse than others, or the take the car and make the travel up to the nice asian shop they read about on the internet, because that’s apparently worth it.

What's better: having to do a few minutes of research to find a good sofa repair shop in your city or having to buy a new sofa every 5 years?

Further: what's better for you personally, and what's better for the planet? Are they compatible?

> But, surprise, this second option doesn't scale.

Why is it important for every type of business to scale? Is "scale" a virtue we must judge every business by?

[setgree]

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2010/07/19/stupidity-scales/

> We can’t use common sense because it doesn’t fit on a form.

> We can’t use a simple approach to solve the problem in front of us unless the same approach would also work on a problem 100x larger that we may never have.

> If the smart thing to do doesn’t scale, maybe we shouldn’t scale.

[brewdad]

When the sofa refurbisher can only handle 100 sofas a year, the 101st customer doesn't have any where to go. Perhaps the market will then lead a second refurbisher to set up shop but that only moves the constraint somewhere else in the supply chain. By its very nature, these small shops can never serve "everyone" the way the big box retailers and flat pack builders can. It's not really a solution to the problem at hand.

[izacus]

Aren't those "constrants" and having people set up shop to solve them literally the most important and critical basic block of our western economies and are critical for social wellbeing? Why do you keep trying to paint this as a negative in response to essentially command economy the monopolies create?