The Root Beer Cartel

Lileks is applying oil industry economics to the price of root beer. An excerpt:

I'm usually immune to check-out line sale items, but who can resist 99 cent quart jugs of root beer? Cheap, indeed. Of course, that's almost $4 a gallon, which is more expensive than gasoline. Understandable; they have to pump the crude Root from the ground, ship it across the sea, refine it, pay for the pipelines and the rest of the distribution network. If we broke our dependence on foreign Root, or perhaps generated the froth with windmills, we'd see cheap Root Beer again.