The radio had a tribute to Bob Barker, who retires today after 35 years hosting The Price is Right. I always admired the genius of that show in making product placement an essential part of the show -- the show was about the advertisers and made the audience think about how much the product was worth and remember it. I'm surprised we didn't see more copycat game shows. There's plenty of product placement today, but it's largely gratuitous, not integral as this was. The fans on the radio said that while the show was gone, they could always watch reruns.

At first I laughed at this -- clearly you could not watch them too soon. But then I thought it might be amusing to see reruns from decades ago just because it would shock us as to how the prices of the items had changed. And then I thought you could recreate the show today, with modern people, and their puzzle would be figuring out the prices of items from the past. And this could be not simply the recent past -- there is no reason the game could not go back centuries, and puzzle the audience about history as well as commerce.

One could even invert the question. "I have here one gallon of gas. What year did it first hit 25 cents?" instead of "Here's a gallon of Gas. What did it cost in 1950?" Of course, the product placement opportunities are perhaps not nearly as good. Companies would not love to remind consumers how much more they charge for things today.