The Short Run

The first number you look for is how many. Eighty pieces, one drop, one door in this city that got them, sizes gone by Friday afternoon. You are honest about this in a way most buyers are not: the object is good, fine, but what makes it worth the money is that the person beside you cannot get one.

That is a market price, and markets move. Scarcity is the only thing on this list that somebody else controls. The house reprints, the shape goes mainstream, and the piece you queued for at nine hundred sits on a discount rail eighteen months later, exactly as good as it was and worth a third. Say the flat thing too: a run of eighty is a decision made in a spreadsheet, not a fact about what a factory can produce.

The pieces you still wear are the ones you would have bought at any quantity.