Can we send the Boy Scouts an economics textbook? I love popcorn. It’s my favorite snack. I was also a Cub Scout once, and selling Trail’s End popcorn was my least-favorite fundraising activity. (Selling magazine subscriptions for my Catholic grade school was much easier.) My mom, saint that she is, was our den mother and handled all of the popcorn logistics. I am still amazed that people were kind enough to pony up absurd amounts of money for popcorn.
Naturally, I started thinking about this when I was at Aldi, which sells knockoff versions of the Girl Scouts’ much-loved cookies year-round for about half price. Which is fine, you say, since the mark-up goes to scouting. $4 a box? Not a terrible deal. But then, when a friend’s son’s troop sent around its Trail’s End online ordering link this week, I was reminded of how inflated the pricing scheme is for Boy Scout popcorn. Let’s ignore the fact that cookies, by default, sell much better than popcorn and focus on the margins.
The Boy Scouts expect people will pay $25 for 18 bags of microwave popcorn. $1.38 a bag. Aldi sells popcorn at about $.25 a bag, or about $5 for 18 bags. About one fifth of the price of the Boy Scouts! Charity, of course, is why most people will make the donation for the token 18 bags. Perhaps flashbacks to the horror of hawking overpriced popcorn accounts for the rest of the sales. They would be better off buying popcorn from the grocery store and selling it at a lower price point rather than going through Trail’s End.
Speaking of bad economics, remember Beanie Babies? Still hoping to get rich with that rare purple Princess Diana bear? Don’t hold your breath, they’re not worth $99,999.99. One sold earlier this year for $1, while another netted $1,000. The time to exit the market is probably … now. So, liquidate your holdings or write off (mentally) your losses. Over at Businessweek, Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway have a great podcast on the Beanie Baby bubble, the modern-day Tulipmania.
Russian Cislunar Collusion. The Russian collusion wormhole gets even murkier with the announcement that NASA will collude with Russia on a cislunar space station. Cislunar is not a gender identity (yet), it means “between the earth and the moon.” Popular Mechanics has an interesting write up of what purpose the outpost might serve for the U.S. and Russia.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Facebook and Microsoft have laid a 4,100 mile cable across the Atlantic Ocean. It’s the “the highest capacity subsea cable to ever cross the Atlantic Ocean” which is pretty neat. Here’s more:
Back when telegraphs were the main form of communication, you didn’t tend to waste a lot of time and space on pointless messages unless you were rich. Now, you can imagine the amount of stupid being crammed through this technological marvel. What I want to know is whether Facebook and Microsoft will sell cable souvenirs like they did back in 1858?
Gender reveal parties for kindergartners! Over at Acculturated, Amelia Hamilton has a disturbing story about a California charter school with a kindergarten teacher who thought it important to teach 5 and 6 year olds about transgender individuals. She even hosted a “gender reveal” party. Hamilton uses this to highlight the growth of home schooling, which is fine, but sometimes a little bit weird. The home school crowd in D.C. conservative circles is legion. I joke that at certain think tanks, it’s a gang war between the home schoolers and the private schoolers. In my personal experience, very conservative home schooled individuals tend to go to a select few colleges. So, if you have some coin, there’s a new market to exploit: start your own college for home schoolers! The growing number of kids (presumably) will go to college, and they have to go somewhere. If you think teaching 5 year olds about transgenderism is disturbing, you can imagine what they’re teaching these days at the college near you.
A Losing Reality for Reality Winner… You remember Reality Winner, don’t you? Turns out, not only is she a leaker, she also has very specific dietary needs that, and I’m not making this up, necessitate her release from prison. Not that she’s a flight risk, or anything.
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