On the one hand, driving is a hassle and it's quick n' easy to walk across the street and start shopping; on the other hand, you can only tote so much back in one trip using two hands.
Which is why I've been to the store twice this week ... often enough to confirm my initial observation. Or should I say, my shock.
It's true: in less than a week the store re-arranged its entire inventory (try finding Mezzetta Golden Peperoncinos when you're in a hurry) and raised its prices 20%.
I assume some wunderkind in management thought hiding every single item in the store would be distracting enough to keep customers from noticing the staggering new price increases.
And I do mean staggering.
How high are we talking about? Like, $5 Washingtons for a 7-ounce tray of Lean Generation Honey Turkey breast slices. Or try $7 bucks for the 10-ounce Cracker Barrel Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese. And I won't even mention produce prices; you'd think I was kidding (how about $3 apiece for green peppers? By the pound, tomatoes and NY Strip Steaks cost about the same).
[read Joe Sangl's post about using coupons to cut your grovery costs]
Well, you still gotta eat, right? So you still pick out what you need ... and grit your teeth.
Then you make your way to the checkout lane ... and discover people queued up like the cashiers are giving away Super Bowl tickets (with free hotel & airfare) ... because only two registers are open and customers are standing 10-deep in the aisle.
So you glance over at the Self-Check line, but somehow, only two machines are working ... and the lines there are even longer.
I can do my all my grocery shopping in five minutes, but inevitably spend two or three times that amount waiting in-line to pay for four flimsy plastic bags of groceries that'll smear my checking account to the tune of $90 bucks.
But that ain't so bad: couldn't help noticing that the lady ahead of me paid almost $400 dollars for an order that she could've carried out in a pillow case.
I glance down at my groceries and shrug: Let's hope the store's cheap new plastic sacks don't break during the walk back to the boat.
-- -- --
The economy's in bad shape; everybody knows that. But just look at how this grocery chain's management is tackling the problem, and we'll see an unambiguous harbinger of what's waiting around the corner.
Once the economy began slowing down and store revenues dipped, store management moved quickly to reduce costs by "downwardly adjusting" their biggest overhead: Payroll. Meaning, fewer employees, and shorter hours for the workers remaining ... and longer waits for irrate customers standing in line.
But cutting employees isn't enough to plug the national economic dike, not by far.
Because retail grocery sales are down across the board, food brokers had no choice but to raise prices to their customers ... with the result that retail grocery chains had to pay more to keep stock on their shelves, and adjusted to the wholesale price increase by passing along the cost to retail consumers.
Meaning higher new prices for thee and me. The grocery store is just one example of what's happening to our economy: things suddenly seem too expensive, whether its fashion, fuel oil or food. And when voters start grumbling politicians start taking notice, because voters start getting angry when they can't afford to buy groceries or clothes, and still heat their homes.
Look, just in time ... here comes Uncle Sam with a solution. Or another bailout, whichever costs most.
We're from the government and we're here to help.
Once the spiral starts and the Federal Government gets involved with spending programs, here comes the big Uh-Oh moment: if the government spends more than it takes in, Uncle Sam starts raising his prices, too.
So look forward to the government supplementing its incoming by raising taxes, fees, surcharges and everything else ... and to also start firing up the presses and printing more money.
Never mind that unwarranted increases in the paper money supply cause Inflation (and that inflation raises interest rates); Congress says "All we need is another trillion dollar bailout to get the economy rolling again" because the government's got experts that say we can spend our way out of debt... and never mind where the money's coming from, or how we'll pay for it.
Or pay off the national debt, which is about $10.6 trillion dollars.
As of Saturday night, January 24 2008, at 9:59PM EDT, your personal share of the nation's debt is $34,780.08.
Will that be paper, or plastic?
-- -- --
Still complaining about slow service and long lines at the grocery store?
We ain't seen nothing yet. Americans in the 21st century are about to get their first glimpse of an entirely new way of life.
And it ain't at all what they're expecting.
In 1922 Germany, a loaf of bread cost 163 marks. By the next year, the same loaf cost 201 billion marks ... that's 800,000,000,000% inflation. For some elderly folks, that meant using their entire lifetime savings to buy an apple. No kidding.
The value of German mortgages in 1913 was roughly $10 billion US dollars. At the height of hyperinflation in late 1923, these mortgages were only worthy one US penny. - source
Believe it or not, that was the good news ... because nobody wants to start whispering about the black-hole spectre of a world-wide Deflation.
9:29 AM 26 January 2009 Updates:
