One Word you mentioned showed nicely what you missed here: Plain

Originally it was called an aeroplane. This could be translated with “flat thing in the air”. Which is exactly as ridiculous as your other examples in German. The difference is that Germans don’t mind complicated long words where English does so they just drop the part they don’t like.

That is a strange take because economics builds on this principle to function. If you found a producing company today it will have to buy a material and - by the magic you apply to it - sell it for more. Like a refinery buying crude oil and selling gasoline. Or a goldsmith buying gold and selling jewellery. It’s how everything works.

On a broader take it reveals a Marxian perspective on a market where every item looses its value to the cost of the labor that goes in it. For the alchemist (if everyone found out his Pb->Au secret) the price will drop until it’s worth the labor that went in it because everyone else also can’t sell cheaper.

So labor is all that has value. And owning the means of production hasn’t.

In similarity to coffee: Consider very small producers. The problem with coffe and chocolate is that the real taste only results from the last production steps (after fermentation and roasting). That means that companies that buy from many small farms (sometimes hundreds) have no clue which farm did it the best and thus the farmers also don’t know it.

But because only the farmers have a really strong influence on the quality of the chocolate they need to know if what they did was right.

Now a small company might have their own farms or work with very few suppliers they can give feedback about the quality. The farmers can produce better raw chocolate beans and the chocolate tastes best.

Also because the farmers learn their worth we westeners can’t exploit them so nicely and we avoid slavery.