The Doughboy that ate Cincinatti!
Beans next?
I think I have a bag or two left over from Y2K. Not sure about the Spam.
Maybe I should put it up on EBay.
The Doughboy that ate Cincinatti!
HA! 1920’s saw the big bank runs,
2008 sees the day of the big rice runs, bringing a “depression” of rice worldwide.
Related:
Americans hoard food as industry seeks regs
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2006044/posts
I keep a big bag of rice in the freezer just in case. Have for years.
It looks like the MSM is trying to create a self-fulfilling prophesy. Frenzied articles in the MSM cause hoarding; hoarding causes temporary, localized shortages; more frenzied reports — etc. Once everyone has horded everything they can; there’ll be a monster glut to clear.
And so it begins........
If George Bush came out and said we are banning ethanol in gasoline and drilling ANWR the nonsense would stop.
It’s not going to happen.
how about the government stop using taxpayer money to buy millions of tons of rice every year and sending it to africa.
Rice doesn’t cost all that much, esp. to someone on a panic-buying spree. The store knows what the bell curve is for sales of product X: most people buy about N of them at a time, and there’s a standard deviation D indicating how much a normal “large buy” is by the rare single customer. Thing is, the panic-buy customer can afford to wipe the store out of a single product (buying ALL the X in one store doesn’t cost _that_ much to a motivated customer), peeving off other customers who (A) may very well not buy a bunch of other stuff that they would have when they came in for X, and (B) won’t go to the store for X next time because there wasn’t any last time. Sales of a given product affect sales of other products, and fluke buys (esp. if the buyer is likely to ultimately just throw it all out because they bought a stupid huge amount of a perishable product) can reasonably be barred (by the store, not the gov’t mind you) as ultimately derimental to sales.
Upshot: if being sold out of something had no ripple effect, the store would be happy to sell all of it. However, as being sold out of something DOES tend to affect immediate and future sales well beyond selling out one product all at once, and the store is interested in maximizing profits, they can reasonably bar the fluke buyer from screwing up the cash flow.
Additionally, pricing & availability of some items is sometimes decided SPECIFICALLY to draw people in so they’ll buy other stuff. Doesn’t help to put in a “loss leader” price or product, only to have the whole stock of it walk out the door minutes after it’s available. The point was to make MORE money, not LOSE money.
Besides, the “limit N per customer” rule is acceptably circumvented by just getting back in line again.