Thinking Outside the (Big) Box

Davidson writes economic journalism in a register that is rare and useful: he takes a specific industry or firm and walks through why it looks the way it does, with numbers concrete enough to argue with. This piece belongs to that method — a short essay on the economics of retail scale, the forces that produced big-box dominance, and the margins where that dominance is contested. For product direction the value is not in the conclusions but in the habit of reasoning: pick an industry you think you understand, ask why it settled into its current structure, and you will almost always find a coordination story underneath. Davidson writes for a general audience without thinning the analysis. A short read; pair it with Coase for the theoretical frame.