Why Is a Candy Bar More Expensive in Manhattan? (Some Theories)

by Matt Powers

Candy bar at the bodega near my house in Brooklyn: $1. Candy bar at the bodega near my office in Midtown Manhattan: $1.25.

1. Midtown shopkeepers pay a shipping service to import candy from Brooklyn at 25 cents an item and graciously charge their patrons at cost.

2. Every 50,000th candy bar sold in Midtown contains a check for $12,500

3. Manhattan is an insidious place that feeds off the easily-gotten money of fools and craven-hearted.

4. A Colombian quarter cartel is smuggling illegal quarters into this country by craftily selling candy bars for slightly more to Midtown workers.

5. The bodega employees of Midtown are constantly bored and want desperately for someone, anyone, to engage them in a haggle in order to feel a human connection so they artificially raise the price of candy bars to incense consumers.

6. Money is an abstract concept, realized practically in paper and metal form, that hinges on the caprices of distant transactions and assumptions of a high-powered shadowy elite who are not beholden to logic or oversight so prices for candy, or anything else, are completely meaningless and arbitrary.

7. The wily “Quarters Boys” teenagers Robby and Bobby are up to one of their old tricks by putting fake $1.25 price tags on Midtown candy to make sure there will always be extra quarters afoot. Quarter BOYS!!

8. Everyone who works in Midtown has been appeased by a candy bar subsidy program that rebates consumers $0.25 every candy purchase and no one has told me about how to join it.

9. Slightly more expensive candy has been presented to me as a philosophical inquiry entreating me to reconsider the concepts of desire and commerce, and what has caused me to continually arrive at their nexus.

Matt Powers lives in Brooklyn.

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