<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>SllX</author><text>Probably price insulation.&lt;p&gt;In San Francisco, depending on where you go right now, tomatoes might be $20 a case or they might be $40 a case. Why is any place selling them for $40 a case? I honestly couldn’t tell you other than there was probably a problem somewhere with the tomato crop. But if you’re able to get them for $20 a case right now, it’s because that store was able to get them for a good price, and that means somewhere upstream in the supply chain, a futures contract was exchanged which made that possible by locking in the purchase price in advance for this batch of tomatoes.&lt;p&gt;This is often the case with avocados which might sell for $0.50 a piece in one place or up to $3 a piece in another. Anything can affect the price, up to and including cartels in Mexico demanding protection money from Avocado farmers recently, but pests, weather, soil problems, or whatever might limit the supply and lead to price increases.&lt;p&gt;Walmart, being Walmart which isn’t unlike being Costco or any other major supermarket of sorts where people buy food, would want to limit their exposure to shocks in the market regardless of what’s causing the shocks. So they would need to employ futures traders in order to accomplish this. Even if they lose money on some contracts, they’re probably making money on enough of them to keep their prices low when you go there to buy tomatoes, avocados, lettuce, spinach, meat, poultry, or whatever. Nobody is happy when the price of tomatoes suddenly doubles almost overnight, and especially not the customer.</text><parent_chain><item><author>sbolt</author><text>Off topic but I&amp;#x27;m curious why Walmart employs futures traders?</text></item><item><author>xerox13ster</author><text>I had to reinstall one of these after one of the top trading brass in oil futures at Wal-mart got affected by those fake Microsoft Support scammers and they put the boot lock on his computer.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a pain to set up, but it&amp;#x27;s authentication is unbelievable. It has something like triple factor authentication plus biometrics.&lt;p&gt;To get him logged in to test it so I could make sure it spread across his 5 monitors correctly, I had to use his RSA key + password to log in to the website, then use a physical device that reads flashes on the screen to generate another code with another password, before he finally put in another password and scanned his fingerprint on the keyboard.&lt;p&gt;It was mind-boggling, but not unexpected given this dude was moving millions every day.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained</title><url>https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2019/12/11/21005008/michael-bloomberg-terminal-net-worth-2020</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>phdp</author><text>I imagine that, just like airlines use futures to hedge the price risk of jet fuel, they do the same for their vast logistics operation. They can lock in prices so they aren’t suddenly facing a massive bill if gas goes way up.</text><parent_chain><item><author>sbolt</author><text>Off topic but I&amp;#x27;m curious why Walmart employs futures traders?</text></item><item><author>xerox13ster</author><text>I had to reinstall one of these after one of the top trading brass in oil futures at Wal-mart got affected by those fake Microsoft Support scammers and they put the boot lock on his computer.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a pain to set up, but it&amp;#x27;s authentication is unbelievable. It has something like triple factor authentication plus biometrics.&lt;p&gt;To get him logged in to test it so I could make sure it spread across his 5 monitors correctly, I had to use his RSA key + password to log in to the website, then use a physical device that reads flashes on the screen to generate another code with another password, before he finally put in another password and scanned his fingerprint on the keyboard.&lt;p&gt;It was mind-boggling, but not unexpected given this dude was moving millions every day.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>The Bloomberg Terminal, Explained</title><url>https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2019/12/11/21005008/michael-bloomberg-terminal-net-worth-2020</url></story>