That's true, but supermarkets compete with one another on price and other factors. They are motivated to do things to get more customers. Yes, there are many cases where supermarkets have been bad actors, but that's solvable with competition regulation. Water service is very different, and the current setup in the UK seems pretty insane - you can't have competition on who supplies water to your house. People aren't going to move location because of the quality of the water supply until things get very bad. They are motivated to spend as little as possible.

You can set up a system where companies are involved in the delivery of water in a way that let's them compete. For example, national entity owns the pipes and needs to provide a given service, companies compete for pipe maintenance, IT services, etc. It's hardly difficult to think up a system that is mostly free market and better in every way than what the people from the UK have to suffer through.

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e4325f 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Railways are another example of competition not being possible and where privatisation makes no sense.

	▲	bluGill 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Competition is possible, it just is rarely worth it. NYC subways worked fairly well as a competitive system until the city started passing maximum price laws (which in turn meant they couldn't maintain the system and eventually the city took it over). However the competition meant redundant service to the dense areas as each built there, at the expense of less dense areas that should have got service. It also meant that where lines did cross each other (a complex task even in 3d) they generally didn't built transfers even though a single system would have. The claim competition is not possible is therefor false. We can debate if we want it, but it is incorrect to claim it cannot work.
	▲	qcnguy 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Competition in rail does exist in the UK and privatization turned around the network's fortunes. The ridership graph is very clear: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#... Traffic dropped a lot in the Great Depression but stabilized immediately after, and remained stable right up until nationalization in 1948 at which point the network entered a period of continuous decline, eventually falling to a level of ridership last seen in 1865. That is a staggering failure. The moment the railways were privatized ridership starts going up again, despite the privatization not being complete and being unable to roll back the huge damage done under the decades of state ownership (before nationalization the railway companies were entirely self sufficient, which they no longer are). So to argue that privatization makes "no sense" you have to ignore the fact that when privately managed usage of the railways goes up and when run by the state it goes down. If the goal of the railway is to be used, then it does make sense.

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throw0101d 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> That's true, but supermarkets compete with one another on price and other factors.

Except when they merge/consolidate and say they can find savings (which of course will be passed onto consumers) through "efficiencies" and "synergies".

	▲	jemmyw 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thus my comment about competition regulation.