A Beer for Snowden

On an evening following a hot sultry summer day (and sometimes even in the cold of winter), a cold beer really hits the spot for the train ride home.  Just a block from Penn Station in Manhattan in any direction can be found a deli or a bodega where the proprietor is all too happy to sell me a beer and some pretzels or other munchies.  So, if I have time, I patronize those establishments instead of the ones in Penn Station itself, for the simple reason that the price I pay for their wares is less than that charged by the merchants in Penn Station.

This is nothing more, and nothing less, than an actualization of the laws of supply and demand (and, I daresay, of monopolies).  And it is true not only of Penn Station, but of well-nigh any train station or airport.  Moreover, because the passengers can, if they are so inclined and able-bodied, freely take a walk from inside Penn Station to the mini-mart a block away, the merchants inside the Penn Station concourse do have some degree of competition from the neighborhood convenience stores.

Not so with airports.  Once the passengers go through the metal detectors, they are in an economically-isolated marketplace, and the merchants inside airports can get away with charging even higher prices than those charged in Penn Station (and every other railroad passenger hub).  Indeed, they must, for the rent those airport merchants pay to the airport is higher per square foot than in the same city's passenger rail depot.  And not only do goods, consumable and durable, command higher prices inside airport terminals, but so do services such as shoe shines and haircuts -- and lodgings.

Edward Snowden has been inside the transit zone of the Sheremetyevo International Airport for over a month, eating and sleeping and doing whatever else he has been doing there.

It must be costing him a pretty penny.  Who, pray tell, is bankrolling him?