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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 ($12) on Yahoo Japan Corp.'s auction website Friday. One bag usually sells for less than 200 yen. Photos of near-empty shelves at their local supermarkets were trending on Twitter. The crunch came after Calbee warned on Monday that it will temporarily halt the sale of 15 types of potato chips due to a bad crop in Hokkaido, a key potato-producing region. The northern island was hit by a record number of typhoons last year. Calbee, which has a market value of 507.9 billion yen and is 20 percent-owned by PepsiCo Inc., has a 73 percent market share of potato chips. Potato chips are a big deal in Japan, a country also known for its senbei rice crackers and Pocky sticks. Calbee's potato-snack products were the most and second-most popular snacks in a TV Asahi poll of 10,000 people and 13 confectionery makers last year, and the subject of a primetime show that lasted more than two hours.
Reminds me of the butter crisis in Norway a few years ago, the neighboring country Sweden would have Swedes smuggle butter into Norway and actually sell these for as much as 1.000 NOK (roughly 116 USD) per half kilo. Don't believe it? Well - check out the sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , http://gawker.com/5869463/norw...
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Kim Il Sung invented the potato chip while leading guerilla war units to fight the Japanese occupiers.
Amazingly, it turns out it was a genius long term plan to bring the morale of imperialist and puppet forces down.
I live in San Francisco. Numerous Asian grocery stores carry these chips near me. They are much less fattening than normal American chips, like Lays. I eat Calbee chips quite frequently, and I'm a white dude, and they have flavors most Americans wouldn't go near (Sriracha Squid flavored, wasabi and so on). I wouldn't say I'd freak out if my local Asian store stopped carrying them or started charging 12$ a bag, but it's still disappointing.