The true cost of food and how it was lost

I remember, many years ago, my teacher read a story to the class. I can’t have been old at all as most of the story is a blur, but the concensus is this:

Young man meets peddler, who announces ridiculously cheap pencils for sale. So cheap that he cannot make a profit from the sale. Young man observes as a young boy walks up to the peddler and buys a pen, and walks away. The next person that walks up to the peddler is a young woman, and as well as a pencil she buys a comb.

The young man approaches the peddler and asks why he is doing such a silly thing as selling pencils so cheap that he is making a loss. The peddler explains that yes, he is making a loss on the pencils but as the young woman bought a comb the profit made for that was more than sufficient to cover for the loss for the pencils, but that the cheap pencil attracted the woman to view the rest of his merchandise.

The story carries on, can’t quite remember all the rest of it, only that the young man then applies this to a food shop and by luring customers into the store with an offer of ”cheap Falu sausages” (it is possible that the story said ”sausages” and I made them ”Falu sausages, by the way) causing the customers to rush to the store and fill their baskets with the sausages, yes, but also with plenty of other things.

The young man learns more and his career develops. Another part of the story describes men in suits around a table wondering how they could make people buy stuff for no reason, and as the teacher asked my class what we thought the solution was someone did actually guess ”Mother’s and Father’s Day”! I should point out that perhaps we weren’t actively encouraged not to celebrate these days in school, only to think about whether it was necessary to buy stuff.

I can’t remember how, but I know the story doesn’t end there and we all know perfectly well it really didn’t. It was a very sweet story teaching children the tricks of advertising but whether we actually learned how to be aware consumers is a different question.

One thing is definetely true. The day man invented bargains to lure customers into their shops man lost track of the true cost of food. I’m not even bringing government subsidies into the picture here- that’s another story to be told at another time.

If anyone out there knows what story I am whittling on about I’d love to hear from you, by the way!