The Chicken Drought

I’m not sure how many people know this, but there’s going to be a chicken drought in 2012. The price of chicken is going to skyrocket. The ACCC will be forced to monitor drumstick fluctuations. The major supermarkets are going to offer 4c off per kilogram of chicken whenever you spend over thirty dollars in store. This is all true. It’s going to be rough.

We eat chicken a lot, so our cost of living is going to be affected by this drought. Because our budget is at risk of being blown out I decided to start a home business on the side to supplement my income so we could afford chicken. It’s a business idea i’ve had for a long time, over a day in fact, and I decided the circumstances warranted it.

I built an eBay store advertising ‘Authentic Australian Made Didgeridoos’. My business plan was to operate with a price differentiation strategy and offer authentic, Australian made didgeridoos to anywhere in the world for only $25 including delivery. The site had been live for a few hours when I received my first order. A man in Naples wanted a didgeridoo delivered overnight to use for an Olympic party he was attending. I agreed and signed him up for my premium service. He paid, and I went straight to Australia Post and sent him his didgeridoo.
The next day I received an angry phone call from this man via my outsourced customer service hotline, who patched him through to me.
He said, “I received your package, and there’s no didgeridoo.”
“OK, sir,” I said, “I understand that must be frustrating that you received your package and there’s no didgeridoo. Before we continue, can you please describe the package you received so that I can confirm that the package you received came from us here at Authentic Australian Made Didgeridoos?”
He said, “It’s a postage tube, long and white with red caps on each end. I opened up one end, looked inside and there’s nothing in it.”
“OK, sir,” I said, “I understand that it must be frustrating that you opened up one end, looked inside and there was nothing in it. Before we continue sir, can you you please take the package and also remove the cap from the other end too?”
He put down the phone, I heard some shuffling and scraping in the background, and then he came back to the phone.
“I worked it out,” he said. “Fuck you.”
“Thank you sir, please have a nice day and thank you for shopping with Authentic Australian Made Didgeridoos.”

I took the money I had made from the sale and I rushed down to the Sunday markets. I wanted to buy as much chicken as possible and freeze it for later, the same thing I do with petrol when that’s cheap. I found my butcher and ordered several kilograms of chicken meat, which she wrapped for me in individual bags to make it easier to thaw later. I spent all my didgeridoo money on chicken and began my walk home.

On the way out of the market I was stopped by a woman behind a fruit and vegetable stall. She saw I was carrying a lot of hacked apart bits of chicken and she commented that I must be stocking up for the chicken drought. I said that was true.
She said, “how much chicken do you have there?”
I said, “two kilograms of breast meat and one kilogram of tenderloins.”
She whistled. “That’s a lot of chicken, for sure, for sure. Will it last you the whole drought though? I don’t know? I don’t think that it will.”
I thought that it would have, but her tone made me doubt my calculations. Had I made a mistake? Was I going to end up eating petrol because we had depleted our stocks of chicken before the end of the drought?
“I might have a solution,” she said. She checked to make sure no one was watching, then ushered me inside her stall.
“These,” she said, showing me a long, rectangular box, “are chicken eggs. The chicken you have will run out. Might be tomorrow, might be next week. You take these eggs, you plant them, they’ll grow into chickens. You treat those chickens right you’ll have more eggs and therefore more chickens.”
The more she spoke the more I nodded.
“You give me that chicken,” she said, “and I’ll trade you these eggs.”
“That sounds like a deal too good to be true,” I said. “Why would you give up your eggs?”
“I’m a vegetarian,” she said.
I traded her the meat for her eggs and I rushed home to plant them.