Heh, your example completely skips the fact that someone went out and bought the ingredients, bought an oven, spent the time to prepare the dough, spent money on the electricity to bake the dough, spent the time to take it from the oven, bought a jar, put the artwork on the jar, rented a café, and finally placed the jar with the cookies on the display.

So.... the smartass "just took a cookie" the hard worker just spent time and money for everything else ;)

Somehow the industry booms (at least the ones controlling ownership and distribution), despite all these cookie monsters.