BioShock: Rapture

Ryan laughed softly. “Bill! Listen to yourself! You’ll ask me to regulate industrial waste, next! Why, old Will Clark, up in Montana, created a wasteland around his mines and refineries, and did anyone suffer?” He cleared his throat, seeming to recollect something. “Well—perhaps some did, yes. But the world of commerce is restless; it’s like a hungry child that keeps growing and never quite grows up—it becomes a giant, Bill, and people must get out of its way or be stepped on by its ten-league boots! Oh, I’ll look into stronger drainage pipes outside factories, to prevent a mess on the sidewalk. Ryan Industries will bill Rapture, and Rapture will bill the factories. Come along, Bill, this way—ah! Here’s the other problem…”

They’d come to a shop in Little Eden Plaza called Gravenstein’s Green Groceries. Across the “street”—more of a wide passageway—and a little ways down was another, larger business called Shep’s ShopMart.

Reeking garbage of all sorts was piled up high in the gutter around Gravenstein’s. Bill shook his head, seeing every kind of garbage imaginable, most of it decaying. The fish heads were especially pungent. Shep’s, by contrast, looked immaculate. A small man in a grocer’s apron rushed out of Gravenstein’s as they approached; he had a hatchet face and flaplike ears, intense brown eyes, curly brown hair. “Mr. Ryan!” he shouted, wringing his hands as he ran up to them. “You came! I must’ve sent a hundred requests, and here you are at last!”

Ryan frowned. He didn’t respond well to implied criticism. “Well? Why have you let all this trash pile up here? That’s hardly in the spirit of the Great Chain…”

“Me letting it pile up? I didn’t! He did! Shep did it! I will pay any reasonable price for trash pickup but he—!” Gravenstein pointed across the street at the big man stepping out of Shep’s. Gordon Shep wore a big blue suit, his swag belly straining out of the jacket; he had a jowly face, an unpleasant gold-toothed grin, and an enormous cigar in his hand. Seeing Gravenstein pointing at him accusingly, Shep crossed the street, shaking his head disparagingly, and managing a good deal of swagger despite the obesity.

He pointed at Gravenstein with his cigar as he walked up. “What’s this little liar here yellin’ about, Mr. Ryan?”

Ryan ignored Shep. “Why should this man be responsible for your trash, Gravenstein?”

Bill could guess why. He remembered that Shep here had diversified…

“First of all,” the smaller man said, shaking, clearly trying not to shout at Ryan, “it’s not all mine!”

“Feh!” Shep said, chuckling. “Prove it!”

“Some of it’s mine—but some of it’s his, Mr. Ryan! And as for what’s mine—he runs the only trash-collection service around here! He bought it two months ago, and he’s using it to run me out of business! He’s charging me ten times what he charges everyone else for trash collection!”

Bill was startled. “Ten times?”

Shep chuckled and tapped cigar ash onto the pile of garbage. “That’s the marketplace. We have no restraints here, right, Mr. Ryan? No price controls! Anyone can own anything they can buy and run it how they like!”

“The market won’t bear that kind of pricing,” Bill pointed out.

“He only charges me that price!” Gravenstein insisted. “He’s my grocery competitor! He’s got more business than I do, but it’s not enough; he wants to corner the grocery business around here, and he knows if garbage piles up because I can’t afford to pay him to take it away, nobody’ll come to shop at my place! And nobody does!”

“Looks like you’ll have to move it out yourself,” Ryan said, shrugging.

“Who’ll look after my shop while I do that? It’s a long ways to the dump chute! And I shouldn’t have to do that, Mr. Ryan; he shouldn’t be gouging me, trying to run me out of business!”

“Shouldn’t he?” Ryan mused. “It’s not really a business practice I admire. But the great marketplace is like a thriving jungle, where some survive and become king of their territory—and some don’t. It’s the way of nature! Survival of the fittest weans out the weaklings, Gravenstein! I advise you to find some means of competing—or move out.”

“Mr. Ryan—please—shouldn’t we have a public trash-collection service?”

Ryan raised his eyebrows. “Public! That sounds like Roosevelt—or Stalin! Go to one of Shep’s competitors!”

“They won’t come clear over here, Mr. Ryan! This man controls trash pickup in this whole area! He’s out to get me! Why, he’s threatening to buy the building and have me evicted, Mr. Ryan! Now I believe in competition and hard work, but—”

“No more whining, Gravenstein! We do not fix prices here! We do not regulate! We do not say who can buy what!”

“Hear that, Gravenstein?” Shep sneered. “Welcome to the real world of business!”

“Please, Mr. Ryan,” Gravenstein said, hands balling into fists at his sides. “When I came down here, I was told I’d have an opportunity to expand, to grow, to live in a place without taxes—I gave up everything to come here! Where am I to go, if he drives me out? Where can I go? Where can I go!”