"Reaping Profit from Poland's Tragedy" (NYT):
"By 11:54 a.m. Saturday, less than three hours after President Lech Kaczynski’s plane had crashed in Russia, killing all 96 people on board, one opportunistic Pole had already manufactured 50 T-shirts emblazoned with the Polish flag and “RIP” and was peddling them on the Internet for $8.50 each, tax and delivery fees not included.
"Within hours of the crash, which also killed the president’s wife, Maria, the governor of Poland’s Central Bank and dozens of political and military leaders, sellers were hawking everything from commemorative plastic clocks adorned with images of the first couple smiling in front of a map of Poland to Internet domain names containing the late president’s name."
Here is the funnier part:
"Yet some Poles said the crass commercialism that also greeted the tragedy showed the extent to which Poland, 20 years after the revolution that overthrew Communism, had become a healthy capitalist economy, even as the free market was challenging the Roman Catholic Church as the new religion." No, I am not making this up. Maybe this kind of ruthlessly creative entrepreneurship can explain why Poland was the only EU economy which did not dip into recession last year.
Economists tried to predict the economic effect of the "commercial response to the crisis," but concluded it would be insignificant. But, who knows, a multitude of such entrepreneural ripples can perhaps merge into a tidal wave powerful enough to lift Poland's economy even further.
On the day of the accident, a woman selling Polish flags on the street in Warsaw said she had made a cool $700 in profit. The flags were $6.80 apiece, made in - where else? - China. So, a much needed boost to globalization, too. Every cloud must have a silver lining, indeed.
