The surprising brilliance of meal kits

Ford’s Kumar Galhotra once remarked that carmaking is 100,000 rational decisions in search of one emotional decision. You spend five years and billions of dollars perfecting the drive train, the suspension and the onboard software only for people to choose a car based on the number of cupholders or the fact that the satnav is voiced by James Earl Jones.

I’m hardly immune to this myself. I recently decided I wanted a Tesla because it offers an ingenious function called dog mode. This is faintly absurd to begin with: it’s even more ridiculous when you consider that I don’t own a dog.

For this reason, I argue that the businesses that best reward investment are those which succeed despite (or because of?) some element of seeming illogicality. Consumer capitalism is the Galapagos Islands of human psychology. Just as you can learn about evolution from the apparently needless variation in the beaks of finches, you can learn about innate human needs through the study of strange things people buy.