The economics of train candy?

So the “train candy” I am referring to is the stands in the NYC subway system. Not every train station has them, but many do (168st, 59st, 42st,etc). These stands sell various types of candy, drinks, and magazines.
Every piece of candy at the stand was 1.00$. Now how ever, every piece of candy is 1.25$. I thought the salesman was just gouging prices on me, but it seems to have happened to multiple stands.
So many questions are:

  1. Are these stands regulated by some system or a common supplier?
  2. Who decides this across the board raise?
  3. Why the 25 cent increase? Is ALL of the candy suddenly worth 25 cents more? I’d understand inflation on chocolate, but on everything?
  4. Do prices ever recover from inflation? If the value of a dollar increases, will prices go back down?
    1.25 is such a pain. A dollar is readily accessible. A dollar and a quarter is asking to much of me :confused:
    I noticed the increase a week ago, but truthfully this increase could have been month or two ago without me noticing. The thought “In my day a piece of candy was ten cents” popped into my head, and I realized I understand the grandfather sentiment :smack:

In the past year or so, I’ve found that just about every candy vendor I’ve been to in New York City (newsstands, delis, subway newsstands, smoke shops, etc.) has increased the price for a standard candy bar from $1.00 to $1.25.

I’ve seen it to be a gradual process, with the price increasing at different vendors at different times, but almost all of them have bumped their prices up fairly recently. I assume that the candy manufacturers/distributors have increased their prices.

Maybe the subway newsstands you visited just coincidentally increased their prices at the same time.

Might be the chocolate shortage.

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/drought-world-chocolate-shortage/38145875

Might be a burning desire to make change.

But probably the shortage.

There is an excellent chance that all of these guys use the same candy vendor. So, they probably all have the same wholesale costs, and know what the guy the next stop over is selling his candy for.

Interesting. My experience is that very few of them post prices. Certainly too few to make these sort of statistical conclusions.