If You Have to Ask the Price, You Can’t Afford It.

The Copper River opens for fishing on Monday 5/17/2004. I started out to write about how I felt about the whole phenomenon, but after putting down over two pages of thoughts without getting anywhere, I figure I ought to just boil it down to the major points:

·The Copper River is the 4th longest river in Alaska.
·It produces the first run of salmon of the summer.
·Thanks to the superior marketing of the Alaska Seafood Marketing Institute (ASMI) it is perceived to be the best salmon in the world.
·Demand for fish from the first 12 hour opening could exceed 1 million pounds
·Supply from the first opening is projected at 130,000 lbs.
·We will all be driving around town Tuesday evening with our pickups full of Copper River Salmon, the value of which far exceeds the value of any of our trucks
·At least one restaurant will fire us because we delivered the restaurant across the street before them.
·One can expect to pay the equivalent of $134/lb for a serving of this fish in a restaurant next week.
·It is the source of more hype than any food I am aware of.

After all the hysteria has gone away and the supply curve intersects the demand curve, we will realize that it’s all, as we say in the business: “It’s just dead fish in a box”.