I’ve been having breakfast at Cafe Manolo’s ever since I started coming to Panama, going on ten years now. They make the best ‘batido’ ever… it’s sort of like a milk shake crossed with a fruit smoothie. And it used to be ridiculously cheap. Not anymore.

Economists use a term ‘menu costs’ to explain why retail prices are ‘sticky’ and resistant to change. The analogy is that, even in the face of rising input costs, a restaurant owner will resist raising his prices because it costs a lot of money to print new menus.