I was watching a video from an extended family in Ukraine.
They have a tree of Prunus cerasifera which is the Eurasian equivalent of American Wild Plum except that the fruit is less aromatic. That tree has a bumper crop of plums.
They advertised on a local bulletin board and got orders for four buckets of plums. Each bucket probably weighed 5 kilograms. At 7% sugar (typical for this species) a bucket of plums might have 350 grams of digestible carbs. After deducting for the cost of gasoline to deliver the plums, they are barely breaking even.
They end up giving one bucket and one partial bucket away to charity cases.
The person who ordered the last bucket of plums was not home and they didn't answer the phone calls or texts when they delivered the plums. The patriarch jumped over the fence and poured the plums into a container he found in the yard.
They had started for home when the purchaser of the last bucket called them on the phone. The driver turned around and went to collect payment.
Not only did the buyer pay them with cash, the buyer insisted that they accept 100kg of flour, 10kg of pearled barley, approximately fifteen loaves of bread and an undisclosed amount of dried peas.
From a caloric standpoint, their rate-of-return on the last transaction was +30,000%. They traded 350 grams of carbs in the fruit for more than 110,000 grams of carbs in the flour and grain and bread.
Irrational transactions like this drive economists to insanity. It mocks the dry calculations of the academics when people do things like the family and like the final buyer of the plums.
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| Bag of flour one |
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| Bag of flour two |
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| Peas and barley |
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| Box of baked bread |
Might have been family passing on extras or family support.
ReplyDeleteI've seen such in some of our extended families around here where everybody in the valley is related.
Michael
God knows what he's doing. If more people listened to the holy spirit humanity would be better off.
ReplyDelete