The Chicken Bouillon Conspiracy

There are these little cubes called chicken bouillons sold in little yellow boxes in several different aisles in the grocery store. I am not the cook in the family, but I know that one use for these cubes is good old chicken soup (like my Jewish Mom used to make me when I was sick—or feigning sickness so I could stay home from school and watch the Price is Right). As an aside, my wife makes chicken soup without these cubes; she argues that you don’t need them if you cook the chicken long enough in the soup—but sometimes she is lazy, I guess, because she buys them anyway.

Now, I am not sure what else these cubes are used for—but there must be myriad uses, because the local Safeway sells a little yellow box with an English label, a similar-looking—and sized—yellow box with a Chinese label AND, finally a larger yellow box with more cubes in it with a Spanish label. These are all made by the same company (I forget which one…or maybe I don’t, but being the Grumpy MBA and not the Grumpy Lawyer, we’ll just leave it sufficiently vague). So it seems that chicken bouillons are a multicultural food.

The thing is, on a per cube basis, the prices for these three seemingly similar products can be VERY different!

My wife and I were amazed the first time we figured this out—so amazed in fact that the rest of our grocery acquisitions got put on hold while we began investigating in detail (as a result, the ice cream in our cart melted, but we just swapped it for a still-frozen box on our way to the check out line). Immediately, she told me to check the label—“they might look the same, but they have to be different formulations,” she said. Well, the Chinese version and the English version appeared identical. The Spanish version was slightly different. Perhaps Hispanic chicken soup requires a different set of spices than Jewish and Chinese chicken soup? Despite slightly different ingredients, the cost of the actual ingredients compared to the packaging and other distribution costs must be low on a product like this anyway.

Our next analysis was to ascertain whether there was always a constant relationship between the prices of the different cubes. We needed to test this over several visits to several stores over a few weeks. And here’s the thing: There is not a constant relationship! Sometimes the Hispanics get to buy chicken cubes for the best price, but sometimes it’s the English speaking folk. Sometimes the Chinese pay the most, sometimes the Chinese pay the least. Why does Safeway or Albertsons or whoever decide to screw the Chinese-speaking folks one day and then trick the Spanish or English speakers the next? My wife and I HAD to know what was driving this craziness.

Do these cultural groups demand chicken cubes at different rates at different times of the year? Is there a chicken bouillon shortage during flu season—and if so, which culture has the highest frequency of catching the flu (I guess the Chinese if it’s the Asian Flu?)? Most importantly, can a Hispanic person be harmed if he buys a Chinese chicken bouillon? I hope not, because that could be a dangerous situation for all.

We needed to know, and as luck would have it, we ran into a friend we hadn’t seen in awhile who actually worked in pricing strategy at Safeway—lucky us! But when we asked her about this, she looked at us like we were crazy and asked us why we can’t find better ways to spend our free time than trying to figure out whether there is a chicken bouillon conspiracy at Safeway. AH HA! There MUST BE a chicken bouillon conspiracy at Safeway—she is covering it up!

In any event, if the grocery store is going to try to trick its customers, at least they are not consistently screwing one culture. They are practicing equal opportunity trickery. Perhaps they believe that all cultures have their share of uniformed people they can take advantage of, but they spread it around so as not to draw too much attention? Well Grumpy MBA sees it as his duty to do some informing. If all of these cultures can band together in a common cause to fight the chicken bouillon conspirators, perhaps it will take us one step closer to world peace.

Moral: Read the labels. Understand the ingredients you are buying, and when given the choice, buy the package of these ingredients for the best possible price—no matter what ethnicity you happen to be! Find the right unit of measurement to measure this price. In the case of the chicken bouillons, the unit is the price per CUBE, not the price per BOX (unless your grandma’s chicken soup recipe calls for a cardboard box!).