Clive Crook on Milton Friedman

I'm always shocked at how rapidly great products disappear from local grocery shelves.

As a child, I remember the introduction of Cookie Crisp cereal, which came in three varieties: chocolate chip, vanilla wafer, and ginger snap. The ginger snap variety was fantastic. Then my dad was stationed overseas, so we left the country, and when we came back - no ginger snap Cookie Crisp! WTF!

More recently, my wife and I found at our local Safeway this amazing product called Cruncheros. These were frozen chicken quesadillas. They were amazing. We ate them two or thre times a week for about a month and a half. Then they were gone. We put in one of the cards to request them, but they'd been discontinued.

I'm starting to wonder if anyone has ever put any effort into examining when and why markets fail. Not in the sense that the market itself doesn't work and collapses, but in the sense that a good product is removed from the market because consumers don't really have an active voice in the process today.

Is it a market failure because a product that you found to be great is taken off the shelves? What if your family was the only one to purchase that product?

Isn't customers decisions to purchase or NOT to purchase a product an active voice?

So the market decides with time what cereal will be available for public purchase.

But what about the classic Wal-Mart syndrome... where the cereal stretches for an entire isle.. yet the cereal most customers want i.e. "Post honey bunches of oates" the allocated shelf area is bare or empty...

Therefore forcing customers to purchase what they don't want from all the other BS, or return to the store another day.