The Great Japan Potato-Chip Crisis: Panic Buying, $12 Bags (bloomberg.com)

Demand for potato chips has surged in Japan this week, with products on offer for 6 times their retail price online after Japanese snack company Calbee halted the sale of some of its most popular chip brands. From a report: Calbee's pizza-flavored chips were going for about 1,250 yen ($12) on Yahoo Japan Corp.'s auction website Friday. One bag usually sells for less than 200 yen. Photos of near-empty shelves at their local supermarkets were trending on Twitter. The crunch came after Calbee warned on Monday that it will temporarily halt the sale of 15 types of potato chips due to a bad crop in Hokkaido, a key potato-producing region. The northern island was hit by a record number of typhoons last year. Calbee, which has a market value of 507.9 billion yen and is 20 percent-owned by PepsiCo Inc., has a 73 percent market share of potato chips. Potato chips are a big deal in Japan, a country also known for its senbei rice crackers and Pocky sticks. Calbee's potato-snack products were the most and second-most popular snacks in a TV Asahi poll of 10,000 people and 13 confectionery makers last year, and the subject of a primetime show that lasted more than two hours.

Comments

Re:Dear dumb fat American assholes

[bill_mcgonigle]

World War 1 AND World war 2 both started in and where fought at least partially in Europe.... And that's just the highlights since the 19th Century... Welcome to the gutter with the rest of the "civilized" world.

Don't be fooled by labels - WWI and WW2 are just labels put on times. As the European colonial empires began to fade in the early twentieth century, they wished to re-exert their influence in the world and began a sequence of events that led into what was called WWI, and that sequence has not drawn to a close, with war still continuing today largely over the British partitioning of the Middle East.

Historians are obsessed with weaponry, but just because there were pauses in shooting doesn't mean that the totality of events in every society involved did not continue as a continuous sequence of atrocities and disasters (and of course the shooting starts up again, from time to time).

Wilson and Col. House certainly made things worse, but there was plenty of malfeasance for them to wade into, a consequence of European power mongering.

But those Americans sure like to eat fried food! (and seriously, cut out the sweets, 'murka).