The Hunt for Red October

so the good (no pun intended) people at NIKE finally caved to the incessant ranting and raving by incessant ranter and raver and professional full grown baby Kanye West and made the Air Yeezy II "Red October" available to the public: a sudden and surprising phenomenon which lasted all of about 11 minutes. see, the shoes which yeezy had spent the better part of 2013 shouting about incoherently at radio and tv interviewers had achieved  a status that every product not designed for McDonald's style mass production lusts for: they had become a white whale. an urban legend. a unicorn. a sort of holy grail for every sneakerhead, taste maker, and twitter teenage millionaire to fawn over. they were to the shoe canoodler what, say, "Nintendo World Championships '91" is to the retrogamer, or Action Comics #1 is to the comic collector: a piece of fandomonium trumped up by the real thing i want to talk about here: artificial scarcity.

which makes the Red October worse than action comics #1 as unlike the Yeezy, it was printed in 1938 with ink made from black people and whale infant blubber.

what artificial scarcity does is take something that's is actually common/easy to produce/super inexpensive and by withholding large quantities of it (like OPEC does with oil) or only making a relatively small number of product (like holofoil pokemon cards) drive up the price, or, as is the case with this particular shoe spike peoples desire by making it unavailable for no reason whatsoever. like the McRib. NIKE clearly did this with the red october. let's look at the case a little more closely. 

artists depiction of the red october

NIKE collabs with YEEZY on the air YEEZY. they only make about 3000 pairs and sell them at $225. they make like $800,000 on them (according to kanye) (they couldn't have made more than $675,000 because that's how math works). BIG SUCCESS! YAY! COCAINE SHOWERS FOR EVERYONE! the resale value on the air Yeezy tops $1000. so because of the success and obvious demand demonstrated by the resale value, NIKE commissions the air YEEZY 2 and sells them for $245. however they (strangely) push back the release schedule for the shoe's signature colorway, the "Red October". YEEZY then does what he does best: complain about all the success he isn't having!

that's what he's best known for right? all the not success? right?

he goes on the breakfast club in ny "why they won't release the red octobers?".  he goes on sway in the morning "WHY THEY WON'Y RELEASE THE RED OCTOBERS?! YOU AIN'T GOT THE ANSWER SWAY!" he goes to england. ENGLAND! "i'm trying to be the next louis vuitton... of shoes, but NIKE won't release the red octobers". this creates a buzz in the fashion world. "why won;t nike release the red octobers? how do they look? where can i buy them? when will they be available?" are all questions you were likely to hear if you perused the sneakerhead sites over the past year. what this does is create a ground swell of deman for a shoe that Nike knew they would not have pressed more than a few thousand of. with millions of people demanding them and only thousands pressed (for pennies, btw) they could charge a factory direct price of $245.  that's a brand new XBOX 360 with kinect and watch_dogs!

i DO have a birthday coming up...

and the final piece to the false scarcity puzzle? have a cool person seen in it. like macklemore at nye!now all the stans are drooling on their eminem cds and hair bleach, b/c the unicorn is real and maybe, just maybe the great unicorn masters will let them stroke it's mane for a few minutes (you don't wanna know what it did with the horn...). then suddenly a tweet announces that they are available, and 11 minutes later artificial scarcity proves it effectiveness again. (hell they were on ebay and hour later and going for upwards of $16,000,000.00!!!!!!!!!!)

above: macklemore just despising all the fame and success rap has brought him.

i guess the greater point i'm trying to make is i heard the rib sandwich was coming back on tuesday!!!!!! sign a bruhva up for that!!!!!!!!!!