Grocery Store Lo Nimmakayalu Price 450% Hike Reason Ippudu Telsindi

[siru]

There is a reason for everything :)

A NYTimes article

 

We will all tell our children of the dark days of the Great Lime Shortage of 2014, when Mexican restaurants raised their margarita prices and otherwise respectable bars committed the blasphemy of serving gin and tonics with a slice of lemon. The shortage has become the subject of news media fascination, with the latest piece on the front page of Friday’s Wall Street Journal.

What’s going on? Because of a combination of bad weather, disease and supply-restricting behavior by Mexican drug cartels, the wholesale price of a case of limes has soared to about $100 from around $15, rendering what was once a bargain fruit a luxury item. The Latin grocery store near my house has raised its price to 69 cents each from eight-for-a-dollar, which Excel tells me is a 452 percent increase.

Let’s blame Janet Yellen.

After all, the United States imports most of its limes from Mexico, and years of ultra-low interest rates and money-printing by the Federal Reserve, led by Ms. Yellen, have debased the dollar, making the cost of imported limes higher than it otherwise would be. All this cheap money has probably also fueled speculative activity in the lime markets, pushing up the cost of gimlets, mojitos, tom kha gai soup and other lime-reliant treats.

That’s nonsense, of course. Unless Ms. Yellen has some heretofore unknown tie to the Knights Templar or power over the weather, the Fed has nearly nothing to do with lime prices. Rather, it is all about the idiosyncratic supply and demand within the market for limes, in which the reduced supply of limes is met by higher prices.

But while it’s pretty clearly absurd to blame the Fed for the sharp rise in lime prices, that doesn’t stop people from falling for the same convoluted logic whenever more economically significant commodities are involved, particularly oil and major food crops like corn.

Whenever the price of those commodities spikes, you hear an outpouring of blame directed at central bankers. It happened in the summer of 2008, when gasoline and food prices were skyrocketing. It happened again in early 2011, when commentators were quick to blame the Fed’s quantitative easing policies for a commodity price bump.

Of course, the causes of those price rises were broader than the causes of the limeflation now afflicting the world: The rapid growth of China and other emerging markets created strong demand for commodities in 2008, and the Arab Spring a few years later created fears of future disruption to Middle East oil supplies.

 

[Srinidhi]

lol :P