I moderate Cooking.Stackexchange. Every now and then, we get questions about the price or availability of certain food items. For example:
- Why is canned tuna cheaper than frozen or fresh tuna?
- Why is high fructose corn syrup not available as an ingredient?
I don't have other examples right now, but I'm sure I have seen them on Cooking, as well as on other sites. People wonder about prices all the time. They tend to ask it on sites about topics to which the good in question is connected, assuming that price is deterministically dependent on production costs.
These questions are closed on Cooking, and I also vote to close them on other sites. In theory, it should be possible to migrate them. So:
- Does the Economics.SE community see these questions as on-topic?
- If they fall within the scope, do you want them, or do you feel that they will be unwelcome because they are too basic to be interesting to this community, or because finding such a specific answer is too much work for a SE question (or for another reason?
- If they are outside your scope, do you have a canonical question explaining basic microeconomics? Preferably one which mentions that one shouldn't expect prices to be determined by "expenses for producing this unit + 5% profit margin"?
Basically, while we can't answer these questions on Cooking, I would like us to be able to point our users into a direction where they can learn more about what they are wondering. Then they get something out of their asking even though their question got closed.