A king goes hunting but fails to catch anything. Hungry, he goes to a nearby village. He enters the inn and orders some quail eggs. After finishing the meal, he goes to pay. The innkeeper tells him that the meal costs ten gold coins.
"I did not know quail eggs were so rare in these parts," says the king.
"They are not," replies the innkeeper, "but kings are."
Parking and speeding tickets should have income brackets, at least.
In the early Internet I saw this thing, no idea if it’s true but it sounds good (someone can math check it), goes something like:
A person pays $2 to play basketball on a public court.
Michael Jordan gets paid $2k to play on the same one.
A person pays $100 for basketball shoes.
Michael Jordan gets paid $100k to wear the same ones.
A person pays $40 to go see a basketball game.
Jordan gets paid $400k to attend the same game.
Michael Jordan makes about $5 per second.
If Michael Jordan saved all his money without spending a penny for 250 years…
He wouldn’t even have half as much as Bill Gates!
It made me think differently about money and consumer spending.
AFAIK in some countries this exist but my case is more capitalist oriented. Rich people obviously can pay more since they keep accumulating wealth. It is an obvious sub optimal pricing since the low and even middle class rent/mortgage and other services quickly approaching the most they can pay so they can’t actually save and make wealth.
A long time ago I was working for a mid tier founder up in Oregon.
Pipe dream of a startup, no customers, no product. Money and vision, but no direction and the main problem was that nobody would ever tell him "No" (me included) - to everyone's great detriment.
He would certainly fail at this endeavor...
He was the main investor, after all.
At some point we brought on web marketing help - he knew people at Nike. To my surprise, they actually partnered with us - Nike! He also co-owned a web design agency in Portland, so I started working with designers and marketers there.
When I would travel there, he always set me up in the same hotel. Turns out (a year later), he owned it. He owned the damn laundromat next door, too, because it was adjacent to the apartment complex he owned.
After literally 1 beer, we were now going to do a live, in person event in Portland - he knew people and could make it happen. He owned the building where the event would take place.
At the event he started asking if I'd ever leave San Francisco, if I liked Portland. We started talking about rent and stuff.
I find out he's a landlord there - owns several single-family homes (with awful cyclone fencing) and has tenants around Portland. He starts telling me prices etc. Asks me what people are paying in SF. We both laugh over how expensive SF is - sun shafts illuminating our amber beer glasses as we drink to... Idk what.
What happened was I found out that he was rich as fuck, and owned the god damn town, and everything else. His startup was a joke and failed - but who cares, it was a frame in a movie. I cared about it more than he did.
Sub optimal for who??