It often happens to find on the shelves of stores and supermarkets almost similar food products.
One offered by a large company, perhaps a multinational company, and another one by a small artisan company.
As a rule, the artisan product costs more than the industrial one.
Some people think that artisans are not honest!
Where is the truth?
The volumes produced certainly play an important role.
The industry churns out millions of pieces and the artisan only a few thousand.
Therefore there are economies of scale very relevant in favor of the industry.
But this is not yet a complete explanation.
The reasons of the different price of the handicraft products are also in the fact that:
- The Italian industry, as a whole, receives every year some tens of billions of euros of subsidies in various ways from the Italian State!
- The craftsman can only obtain vouchers ranging from 1,000 to 3,000 euros from his Chamber of Commerce.
- When a large industry settles in an Italian municipality, the mayors compete to give them aid on urbanization costs, aid to support energy costs, aid to find staff, and so on …
- The craftsman, on the other hand, pays for everything of his own pocket, and he often fights exhausting battles with the local bureaucracy. These costs, usually huge especially in terms of loss of precious time (an average of 30 hours per month is calculated!), do not appear anywhere!
- In the case that the industry is a multinational, to the above mentioned contributions are added important public works in support, such as the adaptation of ports for the docking of large container ships, airports to receive large cargo, etc.. All these costs fall on the national community where the multinational decides to go and sell its products. In our case on Italian taxpayers!
- None of this happens in the case of the artisan. The artisan has to pay for everything at full cost: for him there is no support of any kind!
- Last but not least : taxes! Between multinational industries, national industries, but with registered offices abroad, national industries, but with foreign production, it is clear that these realities pay very few taxes to the Italian state!
- The craftsman, instead, besides being literally penalized by the Italian bureaucracy, has no discounts on taxes. He pays them all and at full price!
Obviously in these exclusively economic considerations, the qualitative aspects of the two types of products are not included. The raw materials of the handmade product are usually of higher quality than those used by big industry. And this inevitably affects the cost of the finished product. But we will talk about this another article.
In light of these considerations, the handicrafted product does NOT cost for us, Italian consumers, more, on the contrary! Remember this when you compare on the shelf the price of the handmade product with the price of the industrial product.
