Sunday, October 08, 2006

Economics 101

When I was leaving the Giants game today, I was pretty hungry because all I had eaten for lunch was a hot dog. I remembered that people sold pretzels in the parking lot after the game, so I found and approached one of these vendors with the idea of buying 2 pretzels (my friends were hungry too). I was incredulous at the asking price of $4 per pretzel outside the stadium after the game, so I decided to try and bargain with the female vendor. Just as I walked up to her cart, she nearly burned herself...

Me (establishing friendly relations): Are you ok miss?
Vendor (mid-50s disheveled woman in front of a shopping cart full of about 75 pretzels): Yeah, yeah, I'm ok, do you want a pretzel?
Me: How much will that cost?
Vendor: $4
Me: Well, what if I offer you a deal? How about I give you $6 for 2 pretzels?
Vendor: Do you not understand math? 4+4=8.
Me (not even bothering to think about how absurdly better I am at math than she is): Yes, I understand that, but since I am buying multiple pretzels I figured that I might be able to get a discount.
Vendor: Yeah, no discount.
Me: But you have a ton of pretzels to sell and the game has been over for 30 minutes. Most people are gone already, there's no way that you are gonna be able to sell all these pretzels. If you take my $6, you will still be turning a tidy profit while also offloading some dead weight merchandise.
Vendor (without hesitation): I don't have very many pretzels.

Sad to say(?), this is why she is selling pretzels out of a shopping cart for far more than they are worth after New York Giants football games. Maybe she uses one cart for an entire season? I wonder what she does during the off-season. Sells 4 Euro bottles of water on the streets of Rome?

1 comment:

  1. 1600...

    BUT, Dan scored higher when they took the SAME TEST.

    ReplyDelete