meat and buns and supply and demand

If you want to be thoroughly confused about the free market, consider the strange case of Kim Kardashian. There is, after all, hardly a shortage of pictures of women's naked backsides on the internet. How on earth does she get this kind of attention for something with which the market is so glutted?

I feel the same way about Sports Illustrated every year: it's nothing other than marketing genius that somehow makes a legion of people wait in eager anticipation for the release of ... a magazine with pictures of models in swimsuits.

With the McRib, McDonald's is basically a commodities trader: whenever pork prices fall below a certain margin, they roll it out and make money, benefitting additionally from the scarcity. No mystery there. But imagine a situation in which every year McDonald's introduced ... a hamburger, and people went nuts, even though they and every other hamburger place paper our world with hamburgers. We could only conclude that it's some sort of sorcery that's overriding the usual laws of supply and demand.

All this makes me hungry for Girl Scout cookies. Dang it! It's not February! How in the world will I get hold of the exact same mint chocolate cookies that are always available everywhere in every grocery store? Oh well, I'll just have to wait.