鱼子酱便宜到可以喂两岁的小孩了：一个很大的原因是中国的养鱼场

Let's start with a price change you have probably never thought about.

Caviar.

It used to be an expensive thing.

In America, a small tin of good caviar cost over four hundred dollars.

The very best kind cost almost three thousand dollars for a small tin.

Three thousand dollars for one small tin of caviar.

So for many years, caviar only appeared in two places.

One was very expensive restaurants, the other was the homes of very rich people.

But now it is not the same.

Now there are new brands selling to you directly online.

One of them charges a hundred and twenty-five dollars, far cheaper than before.

Another, when it runs a promotion, drops from three hundred and forty-six dollars to a hundred and thirty-eight.

The tins these new brands use are different too.

The old tins were black and gold, and looked very formal.

The new brands' tins are pink and yellow, and look relaxed.

The customers they want are different as well.

One new brand says its customers are mainly women between twenty-five and forty-five.

Some people who used to drink have stopped, and buy caviar as a small treat instead.

Why is this happening?

The main reason is in China.

Caviar is the eggs of a fish, and that fish is called the sturgeon.

The sturgeon is ancient — older than the dinosaurs.

It grows slowly and needs many years before it produces eggs.

So caviar was always scarce.

When a thing is scarce, the price is high.

Over the past ten years, China began farming sturgeon on a large scale.

Now those fish have grown up and are starting to produce eggs.

China has one very large caviar company.

It supplies the new online brands on one hand, and starred fine-dining restaurants on the other.

A woman who has written a book about caviar puts it very directly.

She says: there is an enormous amount of Chinese caviar on the market now, much of it very cheap, and much of it very good.

When there is more of a thing, the price comes down.

Not everyone is pleased.

A shop that sells expensive caviar says: caviar that cheap should make you careful.

But there is another way of seeing it.

A professor who studies luxury goods says many brands set prices that high simply because that is how the trade has always set them.

What the new brands have done is call that bluff.

Finally, two people.

One is a thirty-three-year-old woman living in a very small town in America.

She says: caviar used to belong only to people in the know.

I live somewhere small, and there are no shops near me that sell this.

Now she can eat it at home, and she likes having a little on an ordinary evening.

The other is a thirty-four-year-old woman.

She used to eat caviar only in restaurants.

Now she eats it at home, and has even given her two-year-old a taste.

The child's reaction was three words: more, more, more.

Now have a think.

Something that has always been expensive suddenly becomes affordable to you.

Would you go and buy it?