I hope this is a fictitious example and he's not actually paying almost $20 for a cookie.

But I've talked to enough Californians to know how much some people are willing to pay for things.

There's a lot of things lately that I realized that I don't really care for now that they are expensive anyway. I haven't paid for XBox Game Pass since it went up. I'm not missing it. I haven't had Neflix or Spotify in 2 years. I don't miss it. Losing Amazon Prime saved me a ton of cash and made me realize I was buying crap I didn't need. I haven't had McDonald's, Chipotle, or Jimmy John's in a long time. Don't miss it.

It's one cookie, Michael, what could it cost, $20?

Wanna use this opportunity to shill an awesome cookie recipe by Adam Regusea.

Recipe :

Ingredients

• 113g (1 stick) butter
• 200g sugar (1 cup granulated or brown, but I prefer 1 2/3 cups powdered sugar)
• 5-10g (1-2 teaspoons) molasses (optional, replicates the taste of brown sugar)
• 1 egg
• 10g (1 teaspoon of Morton whatever brand you want kosher) salt (use 2/3rds of that if your butter is salted)
• 4-8g (1-2 teaspoons) vanilla extract
• 3g (1/2 teaspoon) baking soda
• 230g (about 1.5 cups) bread flour (1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour is OK instead)
• 100g chocolate chips or other mix-ins

Instructions

1. Get the oven (convection if possible) heating to 375ºF/190ºC 
2. Melt the butter
3. Mix in the sugar (and optional molasses) until smooth
4. Mix in the egg until very smooth
5. Mix in the salt (FYI, some people might not like their cookies as salty as I do), vanilla, baking soda, flour and chips

The dough should be a little sticky — you can chill it for a few minutes to make it easier to shape.

6. Divide the dough into six 115g portions and roll each into something like a golf ball.

7. Space them evenly on a baking sheet — no parchment paper or grease necessary (but you can use parchment paper if wanted).

8. Flatten each ball into something like a hockey puck and tidy up the circular shape.

9. Turn the oven off and turn the broiler/grill on maximum. 

10. Give it a minute or two to heat up, then put in the cookies near the top.

11. Let the broiler brown the tops of the cookies until golden — this should only take a minute, so don't walk away or they'll burn.

12. If you're doing multiple pans of cookies, brown them each one at a time.

13. Turn the broiler off and the oven back on to 375ºF/190ºC.

14. Give the broiler a couple minutes to cool down, then return the cookies to the oven.

15. Bake until they spread and look done to you — mine take about eight minutes as this stage, but they'll take longer if you don't have a convection fan.

For perfect “chewy” texture, take them out when they just look a hair under-baked.

Let the cookies cool and solidify before scraping them off the baking sheet.

the cookie shop was working on it already

Cookies aren't even that difficult to make yourself...

There are a couple of pricey delivery cookie places by my house.

I never used them before, but I was curious how much cookies actually cost these days. Getting a single cookie is $2.50 in-store, delivery is $7, so getting that single cookie delivered would be $9.50.

Getting a single cookie, however big, is crazy so you have to get two right? So that is $13. Then a tip and taxes, and damn that's an expensive set of cookies.

what cookie? we shouldn't judge, maybe its worth it

Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational greedflation.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/greedflation

The cookie in question:

It’s weird how many people don’t understand that the goal of capitalists is to charge as much as the market will bear to maximize their returns. Extra sad that we were talked into destroying labor’s ability to do the reverse. Almost like that created an imbalance that is causing everything (the economy, the rule of law, society in general) to wobble more and more as we struggle to either find stability with a new normal, or everything implodes.