From the hospital in a town that only has one stoplight to its geographically impossible distance from Hartford and New Haven, Stars Hollow has never claimed to have its feet firmly planted in reality. Rather, it thrives in a land of fiction, where Bridgeport (one of the scariest cities ever) has a clean, pleasant, and rather small seaside police station and rich society families live in Hartford (not too far behind Bridgeport on the “scariest cities ever” chart). As for the town itself, with its picturesque streets lined with beautiful brick buildings housing a variety of Mom-and-Pop businesses that somehow provide Lorelai and Rory with all those trendy, perfectly fitting clothes, well, such places really only exist in our fantasies. And on the Warner Brothers backlot.

In this ideal world of bucolic perfection, life is easy for business owners. There are no franchise or chain stores to worry about when you’re on a television show that can’t use trademarks, so restaurants and grocery stores can flourish free from the specters of McDonald’s and Stop & Shop. Their only problem, really, is that they have to hire Kirk over and over again despite his obvious inability to keep a job and his general weirdness, which tends to upset customers. One must wonder: How would Stars Hollow commerce do in the real world, where it would have to deal with real competition and a consumer base that needed it for its services and not solely to advance a storyline? As an amateur economist  …