The following is an excerpt from a reply to a Freakonomics blog post: Some years ago, my Uncle Howard was standing on a ladder picking cherries out of a tree on his farm. After what seemed like a long time, he looked in his bucket to find that he had barely covered the bottom. He called out to his wife, "How much does a jar of cherries cost at the grocery store?" To which his wife responded, "Oh, about fifty or sixty cents." To my knowledge, that bucket and that ladder are still sitting forlorn in the same tree. |
- Research how much it costs to purchase your favorite dessert. Don't forget to account for the gas required to drive there or the cost to have it delivered.
- Research how much it costs to make that dessert from scratch. Find a recipe and then go to the grocery store to find the prices of each ingredient. Try to make the pie as cheaply as possible. Do not incorporate the entire price of spices. If the recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar, and a 1 quart bag of sugar costs $4, only add $1 to the price, since only 1/4 of the sugar will be used.
- Determine the difference in price between buying the dessert from a store and making it from scratch. Also determine the difference in time.
- Economics suggests we should specialize in what we're most efficient at and let others do everything else. So why do we go through so much effort to make a home-made dessert? Is it worth it? Explain your reasoning.