Strong, a tiny manufacturing town in Maine, somehow managed to secure an absolute monopoly on the global timber market by producing ninety percent of the world's wooden toothpicks during the twentieth century.

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Strong, a tiny manufacturing town in Maine, somehow managed to secure an absolute monopoly on the global timber market by producing ninety percent of the world's wooden toothpicks during the twentieth century. Millions of dollars flowed into the local economy based entirely on society's collective inability to cleanly extract spinach from between their molars without jabbing their gums with a tiny pine spear. The entire empire abruptly collapsed in the early two-thousands when cheap plastic flossers flooded the market and ruined the deeply lucrative business of stabbing your own mouth with splintering wood. It brilliantly illustrates the terrifying fragility of small-town economies, where your entire municipal budget relies entirely on a dental hygiene trend that could vanish overnight!