After my original McPost, I’ve continued enjoying a breakfast-sausage-burrito meal at McDonald’s many mornings. Depending on how tardy I am to work — sorry, editors — I alternate between the Mickey D’s on 6th Ave between 46th and 47th and the one on 42nd between 5th and Madison. Considering the standardization for which the McDonald’s is (in)famous, one (read: I) would expect the prices between these two proximate stores to be exactly the same.

They aren’t.

Explaining this is difficult with standard economic game theory: The products are perfectly homogenous (I know; I’ve eaten the same meal from both more times than I’ll admit to readers of National Review); the stores are located a mere nine minutes away from each other, according to Google Maps; these search costs are virtually zero (again, thanks to Google Maps); and the lack of price information is virtually nil thanks to the handy McDonald’s app.

So, what is the price difference between the two stores? Are they a dollar apart? Read the receipts and weep — or at least be as flummoxed as I am.

The sausage-burrito meal on 6th Ave costs 90.56 percent more than that on 42nd St. Yes: The former costs nearly twice as much as the latter!

Why the second doesn’t steal all of the consumers from the first despite zero product differentiation and a non-negligible price difference is shocking.

As a student of industrial organization, I can think of only one potential explanation: Perhaps New Yorkers are so pressed for time that they would rationally trade dollars for a few extra minutes saved commuting back and forth between their office and a closer but more expensive McDonald’s. In this case, although the goods — i.e., sausage-burrito meals — being offered are exactly the same, the 6th Avenue McDonald’s succeeds in differentiating itself with its location, providing it pricing power it would otherwise lack. This is the phenomenon explained by the economist Harold Hotelling in his groundbreaking 1929 article in The Economic Journal, “Stability in Competition.”

I solicit alternative explanations from readers.