If that case ever does exist (god forbid), I hope that there’s something like a free-entry market so they can set up their own food solutions instead of being forced to starve.
If it’s a free market, and every existing business is coordinating to refuse to sell food to this person, then there’s a profit opportunity in getting food to them. You could even charge them double for food, and make higher profits selling to the grocery-banned class, while saving their lives.
That may sound cold-hearted, but what I’m trying to point out is that in this scenario, the profit motive is pulling that food to those people who need it. It’s incentivizing people who otherwise wouldn’t care, and enabling people who do care, to feed those hungry people by channeling money toward the solution.
And that doesn’t require anything specific about food to be in the code that runs the marketplace. All you need is a policy that new entrants to the market are allowed, and without any lengthy waiting process for a permit or whatever. You need a rule that says “You can’t stop other players from coming in an competing with you”, which is the kind of rule you need to run a free market, and then the rest of the problem is solved by people’s natural inclinations.
I know I’m piggybacking here. I’m just saying that a situation in which only some finite cartel of providers gets to decide who can buy food, is an example of a massive violation of free market principals.
People think “free market” means “the market is free to do evil”. No. “Free market” just means the people inside it are free to buy and sell what they please, when they please.
Yes it means stores can ban people. But it also means other people can start stores that do serve those people. It means “I don’t have to deal with you if I don’t want to, but I also can’t control your access to other people”.
A pricing cartel or a blacklisting cartel is a form of market disease. The best prevention and cure is to ensure the market is a free one - one which new players can enter at will - which means you can’t enforce that cartel reliably since there’s always someone outside the blacklisting cartel who could benefit from defecting from the blacklist.