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Charla Chat Thursday at |
September 9th-
Inventor Mark Kirkland is opening a can on the fast food industry with his new Candwiches yummy meals that come in a pop top aluminum container. The 50-year-old entrepreneur has two flavors of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, grape or strawberry, along with a BBQ chicken sandwich and a pepperoni pizza pocket, at $2 to $3 a piece for a hot dog bun, the fixings and a piece of taffy for dessert. And planned pop top products include BBQ beef, French toast with maple filling, calzones and cinnamon rolls with chocolate icing. The 24 ounce Candwiches easily fit into soda and vending machines, and will be sold in stores when they hit the market next month. Because of a long shelf life of up to a year, the meals in a can make perfect meals for soldiers in the field or when disaster strike. Says Kirkland of Salt Lake City: "I wish I had 100 million of these when the earthquake hit Haiti."
September 7th-
Here are six outrageously overpriced products that consumers can't seem to live without. Which one of these items would you never stop buying even if the price went up even more?
1. Movie Theater Popcorn - At the grocery store, microwave popcorn runs about $3 per box, and each box includes three 3.5 ounce bags. So why on earth would consumers even consider paying a whopping $6 for a single medium-sized bag of popcorn in the movie theater? After considering that movie theaters purchase popcorn in bulk, the average markup of movie theater popcorn is a whopping 1275%!
2. Greeting Cards - Since when does a folded up piece of paper cost $2.99? The average greeting card costs between $2 and $4, and we consumers don't seem to think twice about paying that precipitous price. The markup is between 100 and 200% - which is not quite as shocking as movie theater popcorn, but it adds up quickly.
3. College Textbooks - College students pay an average of $900 a year on textbooks and other supplies. College textbook prices have skyrocketed by 186% since 1986, and these expensive volumes of knowledge now account for 26% of the overall cost of college.
4. Bottled Water - You've probably heard that "Evian" is simply "naïve" spelled backwards. Many consumers are willing to pay $3 a bottle for it. In 2009, the U.S. Congress revealed that about 45% of bottled water comes from municipal taps - and then the bottled water company may or may not do some additional filtering before pouring it in their logo-stamped bottles. Still, Americans continue to buy more than 500 million bottles every week, making it the second most popular purchased drink (after soda).
5. Printer Ink - Over the life of your printer, you'll probably pay more than 500% of the total price of the printer itself on ink refill cartridges. At $30, a 42ml cartridge of black printer ink comes out to 71 cents per ml.
