A shortage of o.b. tampons beginning last fall created a black market for the health product, selling for upward of $100 on eBay in recent months.
o.b. derives its name from obstetrics and gynecology or OB/GYN because the brand is allegedly developed by these doctors.
I’m skeptical about its origins, but the brand has attracted a surprisingly large cult following, both because of its unique origin and its lack of an applicator, which many women claim makes the brand both “green” and more compact.
It’s no surprise then, that when the brand started to disappear off the shelves last fall, some women around the nation began to panic.
In similar situations, when a product disappears or goes into demand faster than suppliers can produce, prices go through the roof, and black markets are common.
Honestly, we go nuts over some pretty crazy stuff. Today it’s tampons, but it wasn’t long ago our own LSU-Alabama football game tickets weren’t worth a cup of coffee. Elmo, with his tickle-me tendencies, embarrassed many a people in his day.
In fact, it seems the things we obsess over the most are usually ridiculous.
Imagine, if you will, that you are some form of intelligent life looking down on our little blue planet. Imagine your surprise when you saw how we hoard things like toys and tampons, disrupting our lives, economy and sanity over the most mundane parts of our life.
You’d have to assume our lives were empty and our aspirations absolutely pathetic, but that would be too harsh. We can’t help ourselves, it seems, from taking something rather tame and innocuous and devoting our full attention to it.
And so was the case during the Dutch Golden Age when in February 1637, the price of a tulip’s bulb reached its peak. Ten times the annual wage of a skilled worker could buy anyone who desired it a thing like a single, lonely bulb.
It is considered one of the first recorded times when we went absolutely crazy and in our frenzied desire, coveted small idols that stand to represent higher ideals: our pride, our desire to appear rich and high class and least of all, our desire to own the object itself.
So it’s not surprising that when our o.b. tampons disappeared mysteriously from the shelves, the black market for tampons formed, and with it, an economic bubble.
In an attempt to get some numbers on the whole situation, and see just how pricey the tampons got, I went to the market — metaphorically, of course.
Using historical prices of o.b. tampons on eBay, I tracked the price per tampon from Dec. 22 through Feb. 15.
Several interesting things showed up.
First of all, we can see a faint increase in prices in the several weeks, leading to their eventual decline. It’s not a perfect bubble, but they retail at around 17 cents, and we see a peak on Jan. 14 at 80 cents per tampon.
That’s huge.
Interestingly, this came after Johnson and Johnson’s announcement on the o.b. website Jan. 10, which stated the brand was now shipping. “There may be a delay of a few days or weeks,” they cautioned, “but we are working with retailers to restock store shelves as soon as possible.”
The statement relieved concerns that the brand had been discontinued, but prices continued to rise.
On Feb. 3, the o.b. website displayed a new message stating proudly that the brand was restocked in online retailers like Amazon and Soap.com, as well as brick-and-mortar locations like Walmart. Around this time, the average price was only slightly higher than the retail, and with its return to a reasonable price, the bubble was mostly over. Strangely enough, though, people still continued to pay high prices for tampons on eBay.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter what you paid for your favorite health item, ladies. It’s back, and as one woman’s tweet so eloquently exclaimed: “My lady parts rejoiced.”
Devin Graham is a 21-year-old business management senior from Prairieville. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_dgraham.
 
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Contact Devin Graham at [email protected]