13 April 2010

Bear Market

I may know nothing, and I mean nothing, about how the economy "works" (or rather, doesn't - zing!), but it seems to me like Beanie Babies are a good example of the artificiality of the market. Like, cheaply constructed by baby hands in China, tiny stuffed animals functioning as some kind of high-value commodity? Wha?

I know this is like, ten years after the fact, but I was just thinking about how the local ice cream shop that I worked at in high school was sold by the Beanie-obsessed owner about a year after I left, because the business was foundering. This was an ice cream shop STEPS from a heavily trafficked beach, with no nearby ice cream shops with which to compete. In other words, that business shoulda pretty much run itself. But George and his Beanie Babies, meeting in the shop with his Beanie friends, paying top dollar for the prized and rare (scarcity of commodity!) Libearty, always on the lookout for that unique Beanie that, perhaps, one of the sweatshop children had sewn inside out, or with an extra nipple on its forehead, George ran that self-running business into the ground.

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