With a bit of arm waving, it is easy to derive Benford's Law from a commonplace observation. Many things appear to grow approximately exponentially.
Some examples are price inflation, corporate profits and stock market indexes.
The value of the growth rate turns out to be unimportant. Let's talk beans. Say you start off with a bean value of 1. Given long enough it doesn't matter what value you start with. Your recent article on Benford's Law reminded me of an investigation carried out in our lab earlier this year.