Helicopters rush food, water to cut-off Vt. towns

After the heavy rain from Hurricane Irene, the flood caused the transportation completely cut off from a dozen of Vermont towns. The towns populations are under 200 to nearly 1400 and the town people need food and water. Local government has been airlift the supply by helicopters into the towns. In the towns, people needs to have their basic needs to survive until the roads and bridges are fixed. Because the transportation is cut off, the towns’ economy broke down from the mix economy system to tradition economy. Tradition economic system works in the same idea of just to survive for the town people, but in this case the people doesn't have the ability of getting food and water. In the towns, water and food is the most important supply for the people. Scarcity of the food and water is the needs for the towns and the only source of it is from the helicopters. When the transportation is fixed, towns will back in the U.S. economy as it was before the hurricane hit. U.S. economic system needs the transportation to work or the economy will break down.

NY Delis Stay Open Through Storm

The Wall Street Journal Article "Where Delis Never Sleep" reports that some delis and pizza shops stayed open through Irene to feed the populace. The storm closed many of the shops leaving only the select few to service the many. This "Scarcity" of competition led to a very busy yet profitable day. The delis were swamped just moments after the hurricane with more than enough customers to stay open. Some even ran out of ingredients and were forced to serve abstract creations to the many consumers. Not all that made the decision profited however. Some other non food related businesses had the opposite outcome of almost no customers. This is probably due to the paradox of value caused by the storm. None the less Scarcity worked both ways in this situation. The scarcity of both food for the customers and competition for the delis set the perfect setting for major profits.

Indie Record Stores Fire Back

On August 8th of this year Jay-Z's and Kanye West's much anticipated collaboration album, Watch the Throne was finally released. It was first digitally available on iTunes. Four days later it was released at Best Buy, who had the exclusive rights for the physical copies of both the regular and the deluxe versions of the album. While the album was breaking iTunes' first-week sales records and reaching gold certification in the first full week of both digital and physical copies up for sale, independent record store were hurting. They were only allowed to sell their copies of the deluxe version 10 days after Best Buy. The indie stores were outraged and penned an open letter to both Jay-Z and Kanye West stating that their exclusivity deals were putting many stores out of business. As many of their regular customers would have to go to a "mainstream giant" to get one of the year's biggest releases.