Treasury Proposes Coating All Price Tags in Ice Cream to Test Economic Stickiness
Officials say if a label survives a dip in rocky road, the price is officially sticky enough to justify holding steady through a recession.
In the wake of this year's Nobel Prize in economics, which honored research into why prices tend to stay fixed even when demand changes, a new federal pricing bureau has proposed a hands-on test for stickiness: dunking every price tag in a vat of melted ice cream before it can be approved.
Under the plan, a grocery store wishing to raise the cost of a dozen eggs would first submit the new label to a Stickiness Verification Unit, where it would be dipped in strawberry, chocolate, or vanilla and left to harden overnight. If the tag still clings to the shelf by morning, the price is certified sticky and may remain unchanged for as long as the topping holds.
"We wanted a metric regulators could actually touch," said a spokesperson for the Unit, wiping sprinkles from a clipboard. "Spreadsheets lie. Melted mint chip does not."
Officials describe the ice cream test as a natural extension of the prize-winning sticky-price theory, translating an abstract economic concept into something a cashier can physically feel.
The policy's next phase will test whether prices come unstuck faster during a heat wave, a question the bureau hopes to resolve before its freezer budget melts away.