Banana Inflation
“My grandpa had a banana tree in the backyard. He didn't plant it. It was there since time began. Maybe his grandpa planted it. But this is not a story of how the banana tree miraculously appeared. When a bunch of bananas had grown ripe, he would chop off the limb that held the banana bunch to the mother trunk and passed it to my grandma. He would do this every now and then as and when a bunch of bananas would miraculously appeared and yellowed, and my grandma would turn those bananas into goreng pisang1 so the grandkids could gobble them up along with Nescafe. One day, the grandkids disappeared, and so there were only grandpa and grandma, alone in their wooden-planks house surrounded by banana trees. So my grandma told his husband to sit by the roadside and sell those bunch of bananas to carserbys2. And so he did. He sold it for only 1 ringgit for a whole one bunch! By this time, he would sell like 13 bunches at one go, and so he would make 13 ringgit, enough to feed a herd of pigs and keep some change. One day, a carserby told him his bananas were so dang cheap, and if he were to buy them in town, it would cost him twice. So my grandpa took the carserby's advice and increased the banana price by 10 cents and sold each bunch at 1.10 ringgit because why not? Some time later, his old friend told my grandpa his bananas were too dang cheap he should rather have kept his bananas to himself than sell them away! So my grandpa heeded his friend's advice and increased his banana price to 2 ringgit. For some reasons unbeknownst to my grandpa, every year from then on, his friend and some random carserby would advise my grandpa to increase his banana price. My grandpa was a simple man and so he increased his banana price by 10 cents every year. It went on for many years until my grandpa had to construct an adjacent storeroom to store all the biscuit tins where he kept all the coins he got from selling the bananas! To this day, my grandpa never knew why his bananas were getting more expensive each year. He did not do anything, those banana trees would simply multiply by themselves. Strange right?”
