Why you pay more for stale popcorn

The Undercover Economist
Tim Harford
Visiting a coffee shop will never be the same after this book. Nor for that matter will a trip to the neighbourhood mart. How supermarkets charge more for identical products, how Disney World fleeces tourists, why popcorn is so expensive at movies to how food stores trick you into paying more.
These are the questions Tim Harford, an editorial writer at the Financial Times seeks to answer.Though a trained economist, Harford's tools are that of a private eye���keen observation, boundless curiosity and a dogged persistence to get to the bottom of things. Only the trenchcoat and battered fedora are missing.
From traffic jams in downtown Washington DC to alcohol-fuelled student binges to China's prosperity, everything has a secret to reveal. And the Undercover Economist peels away the layers in easy flowing prose that is lucid, incisive and extremely funny.
Check out these lines about how international coffee chains coerce customers into paying a premium for a squirt of whipped cream or the pedigree of beans: "Starbucks does not have a way to identify lavish customers perfectly, so it invites them to hang themselves with a choice of luxurious ropes."
Or the dry wit of the section that talks about two common strategies used to find consumers who are cavalier about price, titled "There is one born every minute: two ways to find him."
The best thing about Undercover Economist is how enjoyable it is. Harford does what fellow Londoner Alain De Botton did for the equally bewildering world of philosophy and relationships���cut through the clutter to get to the heart of the matter.
Harford is no armchair economist. A well-travelled man, check out this acerbic take on Cameroon. "According to Transparency International Cameroon was the most corrupt country in the world in 1999.
When I visited in 2001 it was the fifth most corrupt, an improvement much celebrated by the government. A moment's reflection should tell you that earning the title of 'Most corrupt country in the World' takes some effort."
The same irony that is the hallmark of that other unconventional economic writer, P J O'Rourke (whose Eat the Rich was lifted from an Aerosmith CD).
Some say Harford oversimplifies and that often his elegant solutions are not rooted in empirical data. But like Steven D Levitt of Freakonomics, who crunched data and numbers to come up with startling social conclusions, Harford is refreshingly jargon and statistics free.
"In the end," he says, "economics is about people���something that economists have done a very bad job at explaining." This is where he scores.