In which I live up the title of my journal and hate it here.

[cernunnos]

WARNING: I may get whiny and ranty. It's getting late and I'm exhausted.

So, I know I really shouldn't complain. I have two jobs (albeit one is still merely in a "potential" slot) when a lot of people can't even get ONE

Comments

[arashiz]

the tea thing...

scarcity + demand = high prices. people are willing to pay that much for tea because a lot of places don't have it. Keep in mind that even if the tea itself is, say, a dollar a pound, and you're selling it at $9 an ounce, the person isn't just paying for the tea: they're paying for the cost of the farmers to collect it, the cost of the industrialists to ship it, and the cost of the employees who sell it. Ditto for pizza.

Yes, it makes ridiculously huge profit margins. but if the food itself were the only cost worth considering, no restaurant would ever fail, as opposed to almost all of them failing within the first year. The thing is: profit is a complicated, nasty beast, and selling stuff to people with more money than you is pretty much going to be a guaranteed.

Look at it this way: I can write a program with my computer, and absolutely no purchased materials. That means that if anyone buys it, I basically made infinity profit. but it doesn't work like that because of the opportunity cost of the time I spent to write the program. Time is important too, and the man hours spent to build the infrastructure of a successful business is downright frightening.

[cernunnos]

Yeah, I understand the costs that sit behind the price. I know that one of the teas we sell is picked and rolled for only two days out of the entire year, which lends to its high price.

Really, it's the "supposed benefits" bit that's killing me about that.