The villager doesn't care who buys his produce, unless he has an agreement with a merchant in town to deliver a certain amount. If the passer-by is willing to pay an amount that is roughly what he would gain from doing business in town, then why would the villager reject the business? He wouldn't. He gets the money, and doesn't have to inconvenience himself with delivery in town.
The key here is that the village does not have a regular market -- perhaps a weekly market, at best. By buying in a village, you're going outside the normal channels.
The player does buy from villages, and so we can assume others are doing the same even if it isn't represented in the system.
I wasn't making that assumption, actually. You should be able to get something from a village if you're desperate for food, but it's not supposed to be a well-trodden path.
The villagers are going about their daily business. You, the player, are interrupting them. They haven't packaged their goods, they haven't calculated how much they need to store up for the winter or for spring planting, etc. They're going to do all of this eventually -- but only when they prepare to go to town themselves.
The player is asking the peasants to do a lot of extra work. He or she isn't really saving them much of a trip, as the villagers will have to go anyway to buy other goods that the player isn't carrying, and sell other goods that the player doesn't want.
Perhaps more importantly, the villagers are only hazily aware of the latest prices in town themselves. However, they don't think that player is there out of charity. Villagers are traditional folk, and are suspicious of anyone who isn't going through the usual channels -- which is to say, buying and selling at the regular market. They will part with their goods, but only if the player is willing to fork out so much cash that the villager can be pretty confident that he or she is not getting ripped off.
I don't want to incentivize buying at source, because as far as I'm aware, this is not how traders made a profit in the medieval era. They made a profit out of their willingness to travel considerable distances and their knowledge of price differences
between regions, rather than
within them.
. I'm not requesting it be changed, I'm just offering a counter point to Nijis's post (regarding cost of buying from the source versus through the middlemen).
