Drop Til You Shop

“We learned to focus on the rare thing at the expense of what was around it—psychologists call this ‘tunneling’—and to prioritize avoiding loss over gaining rewards. It was typically smarter to fight for something everyone else wanted than to waste time looking for something else. That animal wisdom is a reason our species survived. It is also a reason that, in late 2025, you could find a grown adult—a person who lives in the kind of material plenitude our distant ancestors could never dream of—in a Starbucks parking lot before dawn, desperately seeking a coffee cup shaped like a teddy bear. You see, this coffee cup was available only as a drop.” The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Highly Exclusive Way That Everybody Shops Now. “When everything’s a drop, what’s the point of a drop?”