A Good, Good Sign...

Today I went grocery shopping after having dropped the kids off at Kumon and guess what they have stocked on the shelves after a weeks-long absence? This:

Over the years we've lived in Texas, this stuff has become our most important daily requirement for making living outside of New Orleans bearable. Fortunately for us it became available in Austin grocery stores in the early nineties.

While grocery shopping a few days after Katrina hit, I went to the coffee aisle to find one lonely orange can on the shelf. It hadn't occurred to me until that moment that it might be a while before new stock would be available again. Damn. We Americans can be so fat and oblivious sometimes, living up to our eyeballs in plenty.

Needless to say I snatched that bad boy up. I then went to the grocery across the highway but they were already out, but it was okay because I had a backup plan. For whatever cultural reasons, the Vietnamese-American community is utterly hooked on Cafe du Monde chicory coffee. Go to Cafe du Monde itself on Decatur Street and the entire staff is inexplicably Vietnamese. Go to any Vietnamese restaurant and it's on the menu, served with sweetened condensed milk. Go to any Asian grocery and you'll usually find cases of it stacked to the ceiling. The next day my wife Varshna went to the largest Asian grocery in Austin and sure enough, there was the stack—behind the register, with the various cheap non-New Orleans yellow can imitation brands stacked out front. The Vietnamese, it seems, are quite familiar with scarcity. My wife nonchalantly asked for six cans. The woman behind the register looked her in the eye and smiled: "Three can limit." I think there was something in the tone of her voice that immediately convinced my wife that if she wanted three cans, she shouldn't argue.

Anyway, I opened our last can a couple of days ago, so it was wonderful to see it back in stock, even if the price was fifty percent higher than usual. It's cool how free markets use the price system to ration scarce stuff to those most willing or able to pay higher prices. Let those who don't really care opt for the cheap yellow can imitations. This native New Orleanian will gladly, even eagerly pay more for the real deal.