A Thing I Wrote: Market Clones

Hey it’s a post I wrote for another site. Read it, it’s fun.

A recent question posted to “AskMeFi” — the popular crowd sourced question and answer subsite of Metafilter.com — asked users to suggest products that were priced differently, depending on market and intended use. The example offered was food-grade mineral oil, which is costly when marketed and sold as butcher block oil, but inexpensive when marketed and sold as a laxative (as much as $1.74 per ounce versus as little as $.29 per ounce).

Same product, different market, different intended use, different price. The next time I buy a bottle of butcher block oil, I’ll visit RiteAid instead of Williams-Sonoma.

How many other bargains like this are out there?