What’s your go-to snack at the airport? A pack of honey roast almonds and a can of coke, or do you prefer coffee and a Snickers? For one New York comedian, it was a bag of Chex Mix but the price they paid when passing through an airport sent them down a snack-buying rabbit hole that highlighted the real issues facing America.
The outrage began when comedian Kylie Brakeman was charged a ridiculous amount for a bag of Chex Mix at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The 8.75-ounce bag, which would set you back around $6.15 in stores like Walmart, cost Brakeman $9.99 in the New York airport, reports the Wall Street Journal. As the site explains:
Chex Mix is Brakeman’s go-to plane snack, she says. She prefers trail mix, but she says it’s usually too pricey. “I’m pretty ride-or-die for Chex Mix,” says Brakeman, who counts writing for ‘The Tonight Show’ among her credits.
But rather than just moaning about the price on stage in a sketch and moving on with her life, Brakeman decided to use her platform for good and uncover just how insane the pricing got for their beloved snack. So they took to Twitter X.
After posting the price of her bag online, Brakeman asked everyone else for their own overpriced airport snacks and was soon flooded with responses. As the WSJ explains:
Responses came pouring in from all over. A $6.99 bag of Chex Mix was reported at Hermes Quijada International Airport in Tierra del Fuego province, Argentina. Brakeman shared the results with a Google spreadsheet.
The experiment gave Brakeman a crash course in what it’s like to be a statistician.
The cheapest price recorded for a bag of original Chex Mix was in New Orleans, where Brakeman’s people on the ground said it cost $3.49. At the other end of the spectrum, Las Vegas was charging almost $10 more with its $13.29 bag.
What is the reason for these sky-high prices, I hear you ask? Well, it turns out it’s because most airports use something called “street pricing plus.” This means that the price of a bag of Chex Mix in a airport is tied to its price in the real world, but it is hiked up by a percent to “account for the added costs of doing business at an airport,” the WSJ reports.
According to the site, most airports require that shops set prices “no higher than 10 percent above” high street prices in their local area. However, there are some that don’t have these same restrictions, which is why airports in Nevada can be found hawking Chex Mix for $13.29. I guess that’s what you get for waking up in Vegas.
