I'm amazed at how the free market economy works through... Met a diehard Packer fan on my flight back from NJ. He was traveling this weekend from NJ to Green Bay for the NFC Championship game. He told me about the flight tickets that he bought the previous week. During the Giants Cowboys game, the ticket prices were hovering around $500 and as soon as the game was over, all flights to the Wisconsin area were a $1000 dearer! Free market economy and demand based pricing at its best. But, in a stark contrast to this is the price of coffee beans which is the second most traded commodity after oil. No matter how much you pay for your coffee at your neighborhood Starbucks, the farmer who produces the beans with 5 years of toil spent on each coffee tree, gets paid less than a $1 per pound! Taylor Clark in his book "Starbucked" analyzes this conundrum with the conclusion that the cheaper robusta coffee beans flooding the market have brought the coffee prices down and even the genuinely good arabica coffee bean prices have been hit as a result. The book was an amazing read for its insights into coffee and its roots.
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