The poor oil companies. Everyone (especially me) complains about the cartels and price-fixing that balloons our gasoline prices toward $3 a gallon and heating oil through the roof.
What about popcorn, printer ink cartridges, wine and hot dogs, the important things in life?
But when you go to the local cinema, do you even consider the price of popcorn? Consider Richard D. McKenzie, an economics professor at the University of California. He had nothing better to do than write a book about the problem. Our boy Dick computed that popcorn at home will run you a dime an ounce. At the Bijou, you will pony up around $1 an ounce, a markup he computed to be roughly 1,200 percent.
Dicky doesn’t fault the movie owners. He blames the dumb consumer who puts up with it.
Is there a bigger rip-off than printer ink? One anti-trust lawsuit in Boston alleged that some printer ink cost $8,000 a gallon. They should give you the printer if you are going to pay solid-gold prices for the ink. There should be special cells in the Warren Supermax for these ink purveyors.
Just think of the poor New York Times crossword addicts (me again) who have to print out their puzzle each night.
The American Consumer Institute has determined that refill cartridges can cost 500 percent more than the printer and that Hewlett-Packard executives recently acknowledged that fewer Americans are printing at home. Ink is so pricey that some printer manufacturers discount their machines in order to sell more of the models with the highest ink expenses. The American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research found that consumers could save $6 billion a year if they opted for printers with lower ink costs rather than those with the lowest sticker prices.
Who thinks about that when they are buying a printer?
I don’t know about you, but I cannot have a restaurant meal without a glass of wine. It is half the reason for going out, right? I don’t know why, but wine always tastes better at a restaurant. Wine, naturally, is among the highest markup item at your favorite bistro. One New York-area restaurant marks up wine 575 percent, ac-cording to a report in Crain’s New York Business, and many businesses have even higher markups for soft drinks, juices and coffee.
A Cobb Manor axiom is that life is much too short for cheap wine. According to Bing.com, restaurants tend to mark up cheap wines substantially more than they do expensive ones, “So if you’re looking for a bargain, you might need to pony up for that really pricey bottle,” Bing advises.
Oh, all right.
I know, you could always drink water, another classic rip-off. Did you ever think you would be paying $1 for a bottle of water? As a confirmed Poland Spring addict, I buy in bulk at Sam’s Club. But American consumers are becoming more reluctant to cough up cash for something that comes virtually free from the tap, espe-cially because their bottled water may have originated there anyway.
In July, Congress held hearings to evaluate whether bottled water is any better than what comes from many Americans’ home faucets. (They are pretty busy, too) Turns out, about 45 percent of the bottled variety comes from municipal taps, although companies usually do additional filtering before sealing it up in clear plastic bottles.
Sucker.
Forget popcorn and printer ink. What about beer and hot dogs?
Some of us believe that baseball games are now artificially elongated (Step out, scratch. Spit. Step in) in order to sell more beer and hot dogs. I don’t even eat hot dogs outside the ballpark. But just try to sit there for three hours in the Florida sun without succumbing. The last I looked it was $10 for a beer and dog, a combination which might cost you $1.25 at home.
On average, baseball fans will pay $3.70 for a hot dog and an additional $3.44 for a soft drink this year, according to a national study. Despite the recession, fans will pay an average of 3.2 percent more on ticket and concession prices this year. New York Yankees fans will pay a whopping 49.4 percent more, due largely to in-creased ticket prices. That increase is, by far, the highest in the sport.
I feel so bad for those Yankees fans. And the oil companies.
Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.