system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How can big corporate supermarkets sell food much cheaper than directly from a farm?
gpt
Basically, because farms are charging you a \*lot\* more when you buy direct from them than what they charge the supermarket for.

A big chunk of that is value pricing...most people are willing to pay more for direct-from-farm food, so the farmers charge what people are willing to pay.

The other part is overhead...the farmer expends basically the same effort/cost to grow an ear of corn whether they sell it to you or a supermarket. But for the supermarket they just dump the corn from their harvester truck straight into a megabin that goes to the supermarket, the incremental handling is very small. For you, they have to create/maintain/staff some kind of storefront to sell the corn, handle tiny numbers at a time, deal with the payments, etc., etc. The supermarket has a \*massive\* logistics operation to do that at very large scale and high efficiency, the farmer can't hope to compete with that, so their costs are higher, so they're willing to sell to the supermarket much cheaper than they're willing to sell to you.

And if you're talking small local farms, they're not typically selling to large supermarket chains at all so they're not even operating in the same market space.