The Price of Chex Mix at Every Airport Is the Economic Index We Need
TV writer Kylie Brakeman's viral X thread is exactly how the internet should be used.
The price of snacks in airports is out of control. It got so bad that, in 2022, New York City officials placed limits on just how much retailers could price gouge. But even with that measure in place, that hasn't slowed down the dramatic markup that happens in the liminal space beyond the TSA security checkpoints. It is sometimes so extreme that it can be shocking—I recently paid $7 for a bottle of water. But I had 45 minutes until boarding and I was desperately thirsty, so I was successfully extorted by the little self checkout booth.
It's not just water that is dramatically overpriced; just about every sort of snack, drink, and other form of sustenance is extra pricey at the airport. Actor and TV writer Kylie Brakeman just posted on X (formerly Twitter) about the record she was keeping about Chex Mix. In her Notes app, she logged the price of the snack at three different airports. The same eight-ounce bag of the snack cost $9.99 at LaGuardia, $5.99 at Indianapolis International, and $4.76 at Dallas/Fort Worth.
But soon, what was just a good joke on a stupid problem blossomed into something much bigger in a way something only on the internet can. Hundreds of people began to share their own data on exactly how much they paid for Chex Mix at various airports. It was citizen science at its finest. Brakeman set up basic parameters for the data: It had to be the traditional-flavor, eight-ounce bag of Chex Mix. She excluded data that she considered to have “bad vibes” and added the caveat that she previously got a "C" in statistics.
From a data gathering standpoint, it's pretty good. The resulting data even includes a column indicating whether the person submitted photo evidence of the price. When they didn't, Brakeman included a qualitative assessment of the submitted information's trustworthiness. The biggest conflicting information is for San Francisco, where one submission states the price for Chex was $4.99 and another states the price was $20 (!). But beyond that outlier, the prices for a single bag of Chex Mix ranged between $4.99 all the way up to $14.99 (at the Seattle airport).
Thrillist reached out to Hudson News, one of the nation's biggest airport retailers, about how prices are set at the kiosks and shops where these snacks are sold. They did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication. But based solely on the imprecisely gathered data assembled by Brakeman and anecdotes by literally anyone who has recently traveled through airports, it's clear that the prices we're paying for snacks are not set by any standard the consumer is aware of.
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