The economics of lunch

A large supermarket opened in the ground floor of my office building, giving me the option to buy ingredients to make lunch at a significant discount from what I would usually pay to buy lunch in the city.

Of course this raises the question of why I didn’t do this already when I visited the local supermarket near to my home. You might say I’m lazy, but the economist in me has other answers -

I only visit my local supermarket infrequently, so I would need to buy larger quantities, with the accompanying risks and costs of spoilage and storage, plus less daily variety in my lunch.

It’s a little inconvenient to bring the lunch with me on the bus, and I might forget.

I have to decide what I want for lunch in advance and give up the option value of deciding at the last minute.

So, apparently I was willing to pay a price premium because of these costs. But now having a supermarket very near to my office means I can have the best of both worlds. The supermarket should be able to charge a higher price and extract some of the surplus, but they don’t seem to be doing that, so it’s all gain for me!