Fable
Both the free market and the trading caravans can get handmade goods delivered
In the south of the city, two groups could both deliver goods to the market. One was free-trading itinerant merchants—each stocked their own goods, found their own routes, and hawked their own wares at the market. The other was a division-of-labor caravan—one shopkeeper, one accountant, one runner, one cargo watcher, fixed routes, each handling only their own part. Both groups reached the market on time, and the out-of-town merchants watched for a long while without seeing any difference.
Itinerant traders had the advantage at night. When the market changed location, some heard from afar and immediately changed route; when a stall raised prices by a few tenths, nearby people immediately gathered. No one gave orders; news flowed with the crowd. That month the market moved three times in a row, and the itinerant traders arrived in full every time, while the caravan once took a detour of forty li because the runner did not know the new road.
When it came to people skipping out on bills, the situation reversed. When a merchant defaulted on payment, no one in the scattered traders' group was willing to step forward—who should pursue it? How should the recovered money be divided? Everyone nodded at each other, and in the end no one moved. On the caravan side, the manager directly pulled out the receipt, the accountant wrote a collection letter, and the waiter blocked the merchant's doorway. On the day of debt collection, the free market dispersed faster than anyone's stall.
Out-of-town merchants began to view people by two sets of standards. Work that required flexible scouting, real-time price comparison, and adapting to market changes was given to independent traders; work that required credit accounts, signing contracts, allocating responsibility, and recording entries and exits was given to caravans. But trouble appeared at the boundary: who evaluates whether a new merchant is worth long-term cooperation? Independent traders could not give an overall judgment, and caravans were afraid of assigning the wrong person.
One day heavy fog covered the road, and both sides ran into trouble. In the scattered merchants' group, someone got lost, but the others kept going and the group as a whole was not delayed; the caravan, because a runner fell behind, stopped the entire group to wait—the accountant could not carry goods, and the manager did not know the way. After the fog cleared, the client said both groups had goods arrive, but the receiving experience was completely different.
The accountant later talked with one of the most seasoned itinerant merchants. He said that if there were enough people, perhaps roles would not need to be fixed; everyone could calculate their own accounts, find their own way, and settle their own payments. The other shook his head and said that then you would no longer be a caravan, but a crowd of peddlers, and the numbers in the account book would become more and more chaotic.
The caravan later continued doing long-term orders, while the itinerant traders continued grabbing new markets. Occasionally the two sides cooperated—the caravan allocated part of its stable orders to the itinerant traders for testing, and the itinerant traders transferred large orders to the caravan for long-term delivery. The difference between the two sides came down to the work itself: how many people needed to align, and how quickly a collective response was needed.