Economics and business

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is from the memoir Counter Hours by Nora Pettibone. The narrator recalls a summer job at her uncle's hardware store. (Original practice text; the author, the work, the people, the store and the town are fictional.) Line numbers appear in the left margin every 5 lines.

The summer I turned sixteen, my uncle Wendell hired me to work the register at Aske Hardware in Carrow Falls, and on my first morning he walked me to the back corner of the store and showed me what he called the museum. It was a set 5 of steel shelves, taller than either of us, holding things nobody had bought: a case of copper weather vanes shaped like roosters, two dozen cast-iron waffle irons, a pyramid of lime-green garden hoses, and a snowblower still wearing its original price tag. 10 "Don't dust back here too much," he said. "It makes them look old." Some of them were old. The weather vanes had arrived when I was five. My uncle had ordered them from a salesman who promised they would sell to the summer people, and they 15 had not, because the summer people, it turned out, preferred to buy their weather vanes in the city. He had paid forty dollars apiece. Every spring, he told me, someone would pick one up, turn it over, ask whether he would take twenty-five, and set it down again when he said no. 20 "Why not take twenty-five?" I asked. He looked at me as if I had suggested setting the store on fire. "Because I paid forty. I'd be losing fifteen dollars on every one." I did not argue. I was sixteen, and he had run the store 25 for twenty-two years. But the question stayed with me all summer, partly because I was the one who had to squeeze past the museum every time I restocked the paint aisle. The shelves took up nearly a sixth of the floor. On busy Saturdays, customers asked for things we did not carry, and 30 my uncle would say, "No room," and nod toward the shelves he would not empty. In August the high school offered a short economics course for extra credit, and I signed up because it met in the air-conditioned library. On the third day, the teacher, 35 Mrs. Halloran, wrote two words on the board: sunk cost. A sunk cost, she said, is money that has already been spent and cannot be recovered, whatever you decide next. Because it is the same under every choice you could make, it should not change which choice you make. The only question worth 40 asking is what each choice gives you from here on. I thought about the roosters the whole walk home. My uncle was not choosing between losing fifteen dollars and losing nothing. The forty dollars had left the store eleven years earlier, and nothing he did could bring it back. His 45 real choice was between twenty-five dollars and a shelf, and the shelf was not free. I tried explaining this at dinner. It did not go well. My uncle said that textbooks had never met a salesman, and my aunt changed the subject to the county fair. But the next 50 Saturday, when a woman held up a waffle iron and asked if he would take ten dollars for it, I watched him hesitate for a long moment before he said no. He did not clear the museum that year, or the next. What finally emptied it was a spring flood that put four inches 55 of water across the back of the store and ruined most of the hoses. After the cleanup, he held a sale and marked the surviving weather vanes at twenty dollars. They were gone by noon. Where the shelves had stood, he put a rack of work gloves and rain boots, and they sold faster than he could 60 reorder them. "I should have done that ten years ago," he told me on the phone that fall. Then, because he was my uncle, he added, "Don't tell your teacher."