Basic Trope: Characters in some sort of Crapsack World have to buy food at thousands of times what that food is actually worth.
- Straight: Alice buys an apple from Bob for $100.
- Exaggerated: Alice buys an apple from Bob for $1,000,000. And it's rotten, bruised, already bitten into, or just not very tasty.
- Downplayed:
- Alice buys an apple for $5, and it's relatively high-quality.
- The black market status applies only to edible seeded plants which are explicitly temporary because the crop became endangered. Eating it instead of using it to grow more is the crime.
- Justified:
- Due to a famine or a severe drought, a war, a natural disaster, a tyrannical government, or some combination of the above, food is scarce, and people try to take advantage.
- The apple really is worth that much money, because of the way in which it's grown, and the fact that it only grows in one faraway part of the world.
- Ridiculous Exchange Rates have led to a decrease in the value of money and an increase in prices.
- Inverted: Alice buys a house from Bob for $1.
- Subverted:
- It's a variety of apple that's unique, and only grows under very finicky conditions in one small patch of the world.
- Bob is the owner of a legitimate grocery store.
- Due to Ridiculous Exchange Rates, $100 is really the equivalent of $1.
- The cost of the apple itself is fine.
- Double Subverted:
- Or so Bob says. In actuality, it's an ordinary Macintosh apple.
- Which is gouging prices to take advantage of a bad situation.
- It's still more than Alice has, and more than the apple is actually worth.
- The taxes on it, however, are exorbitant.
- Parodied: Alice has to take out another mortgage just to buy food.
- Zig Zagged: The costs of foods are completely arbitrary. Some normal foods are reasonable, some are unaffordable.
- Averted:
- Food and other basic necessities are fairly priced.
- The setting has no concept of money.
- Enforced: "We need to show that this is truly a Dystopia, a Wretched Hive, or some other type of Crapsack World, that it's so bad that people can't even buy what they need to survive.
- Lampshaded: "You know, these used to be really cheap."
- Invoked: Alice runs out of food in the aftermath of a war and a natural disaster, and the crops weren't doing too well to begin with due to lack of rain.
- Exploited: Bob jacks up his prices to earn a bigger profit.
- Defied: Alice was Crazy-Prepared, and has some apple rings frozen in her second freezer, or dried or canned in her second pantry.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
Back to Black Market Produce
