Commerce Thrives in the Most Unlikely Venues

The Economist has this provocative, if not grisly, story in this week's magazine. You can find the article here. It is named, "Wet Goods and dry goods".You may need to be a subscriber.

The title of the story is a bit misleading. The goods, as it turns out, happens to be fresh corpses (wet) v. not-so-fresh corpses (dry). We can always appreciate that capitalism will (1) fill any niche that suffers from a supply and demand issue, and for which circumstance once can be handsomely compensated and (2) always prove irrepressible for it speaks to the very essence of our nature: greed. Secondarily, we are alerted to a new place where inflation has cropped up. Here's an intro to this unusual commerce:

"Chinese tradition demands that husbands and wives always share a grave. Sometimes, when a man died unmarried, his parents would procure the body of a woman, hold a “wedding” and bury the couple together.. . .

The practice is most common in the northern provinces of Shanxi, Hebei and Shandong. This is China's coal-mining heartland. In mountainous Shanxi, pit accidents kill many men too young to marry. Compensation to the family is spent on giving their son a wife in the afterlife."

Inventory for such pairings has traditionally come from hospital mortuaries, funeral parlors and body snatchers. Four years ago, fresh merchandise would fetch only a few thousand yuan; however, now such merchandise commands a rather lucrative price of 30-40K yuan equating to $4-5.3K. For that price, more assertive entrepreneurs have resulted to more aggressive grave robbing in addition to murder.

Oh, the cultural binds that tie us! Does it remind you of kidney snatchers?

Here's a little story from my past. I have no idea if it is true or not. My immigrant Armenian grandparents had a store at 28th and M Streets in the 1940's. It is an area called Church Hill--one of those previously exclusively black neighborhoods that within the last 10 years or so recently undergone a renaissance of sorts where now you have to be rich to live there.

My grandmother would tell us about "Chicken Harris"--a black man feared by his community. Why? Apparently he supplied the Medical College of VA (MCV) with bodies for cadavers. As my grandmother would tell us, on Friday and Saturday nights when his fellow black men were engaging in revelry which generally involved imbibing too much alcohol, Chicken Harris would roam the streets in a horse-pulled hearse gathering up those who were too drunk to resist.

I don't know if it is true or not. But hearing this story as a child scared the bejeebers out of me.