Hi, friends!
How are people doing? How is inflation and food prices where you are at? Have things calmed down from earlier this year? Things have cooled down from the spike earlier this year with regard to eggs and produce, but I don’t think basics like cereal or canned goods are ever dropping down again.
Related question – LoveShaq, how good is the Northwest cherry crop this year because holy fuck are cherries cheap at the grocery stores here this year! Last year it was like $5-7 a pound for just plain red cherries and this year I picked up a 2lb tray at Costco this week for $5.29. Is it a helluva good crop year for them?
Prices of a bunch of staples like milk, eggs, pasta and meat have dropped in my grocery. More processed food like cereal and ice cream has largely kept the price bumps.
From an economics standpoint, that makes sense — the closer you get to raw commodities, the harder it is for suppliers to add a premium. A dairy has to move its milk or else dump it for nothing, but Kelloggs has more control over the supply of its Frosted Flakes.
Cherries are also cheap where I am, but the big joy has been local strawberries at my farmers market. OMG, a lot smaller than store strawberries, but no sugar needed.
A year or two ago, it was during the pandemic, I found some old episodes of “The Price Is Right.” It was amazing. They were from before inflation really took off, so like the late 60s I think. “Can you tell me the price of this can of delicious Del Monte green beans, now in a convenient 16-oz. family-size serving?”
“I’m going to guess 19 cents.”
Buzzer sounds.
“Oh no, I’m afraid you’ve gone over. The correct answer is 17 cents.”
First of all, we don’t have price controls in this country (we did, briefly, under Nixon and then I think Ford, which is about as far from free-market Republicanism as you could possibly get, and imagine Biden trying to institute them last year when inflation was at its worst.) So how was 17 cents the correct answer and not 19, if the contestant lived in an affluent part of LA? But second of all, the difference of 2 cents used to be a large proportion of the pice of supermarket goods.
They also had these crude versions of Designer Showcases. The cars on offer were amazing. I have family members who are car freaks and they would weep if they saw these episodes. “This 1967 Corvette” blah blah blah and the sticker price was like $1,800 or something. Maybe less, actually. Of course, back then if you made $200 a week you were doing pretty well for yourself, so I guess it’s all relative.
As this article notes, Biden didn’t push for price controls like previous GOP administations did, and that broad based ones were “a bridge too far.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/18/economy/price-controls-inflation/index.html
What’s funny is that right wingers like Steve Forbes projected that he would, knowing that their gullible readers would believe it, in the usual calculation that conservatives were dupes they could take advantage of.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2022/01/18/will-biden-enforce-price-controls-to-fight-inflation
And of course ol’ Steve Forbes belly flopped into the old rule that the answer to any question posed by a headline is “no.” So when he wondered “Will Biden Enforce Price Controls To Fight Inflation?” the answer, of course was no, Biden did not, and anyone who believed people like Forbes were just setting themselves up as marks and dupes.
I think that’s why the whole Nixon Administration needs to be re-evaluated. It was far, far more left-wing in many aspects than the Clinton or Obama administrations. He didn’t give a shit about abortion (he was President when Roe v Wade was decided in 1973) and his successor, Jerry Ford, and his wife, Betty, were vocal supporters of the ERA. Meanwhile, you had lunatic breakaway Southern Dems like George Wallace, who…I would be willing to bet my parents were Republican voters in those golden, pre-Reagan days. I bet I would have been too, for that matter.
If Twitter wasn’t broken and it was impossible to read without signing up, I’d highly recommend reading what the historian Kevin Kruse wrote about the political realignment that happened in the 60s and 70s.
Maybe it’s archived somewhere. But he’s a rare writer who is both incredibly knowledgable and incredibly entertaining, and he has great things to say about Nixon, Wallace, LBJ, and more.
He gets out of the present day traps of simplistic left-right slotting, and really digs into better ways to think about how the events of 50-60 years ago relate to where debates are today.
Also he makes fun of Dinesh D’Souza in about 59 different funny ways.
Dinesh D’Souza! That’s a name I haven’t heard in 20 or 30 years.
The AC in my car hit the shits just in time for the hot gross weather. So I get to spend a bunch of money getting it fixed
Had to do that 2 years ago with the home AC as some of you might recall. Was so pissed off about that too as it was during the “first” mention of the heat dome so I was sleeping in my basement.
It survived 21 years so I really shouldn’t complain, but still the replacement cost was /grumble grumble grumble/ and timing couldn’t have been more “awesome.” My sore back and knees thank me for all the bloody OT I worked last year to pay it off before the interest kicked in (got a 1 year no interest plan and took advantage of it.)
The heat dome! That’s what I love about modern meteorology. The constant invention of new terms to describe temporary weather conditions we’ve been living through since the last ice age. Thundersnow. The Derecho. Who can keep up? Gone are the days when you’d read or hear, “We are predicting we will get between 6 and 8 inches of snow,” and then, “It is snowing outside, so take precautions,” and then, “Mother Nature dropped 7.3 inches of snow in Central Park overnight.”
I really dislike that they name winter storms now. I believe I read somewhere that meteorologists always internally had names for big winter storms, but I really dislike how they call them that now on the Weather Channel, etc.
Names are for hurricanes/typhoons. Calling a random snowstorm over Missouri a name makes me think hurricanes aren’t a big deal.
Noooo that fucking sucks. I’m sorry.
Prices have gone up for bread (based on the contracts for the overpriced eggs and milk from the previous year.)
When I buy chicken I buy the thighs because I like the taste better than breast meat and also cheaper. For a while, they were actually more expensive than the breast meat to my dismay.
Drumsticks for a while last year were pretty cheap compared to both so I switched to buying them instead when I bought chicken.
And with the demise of Buffalo Wild Wings in Canada, I suspect wings will be a little cheaper now.
I’ve been getting a great deal on thighs at my local stores (Walmart and Food Lion). They’re a few cents more expensive at the Kroger (25 miles away) but they’re trimmed a little nicer.
Everything else seems to be coming back down. Last few times I went grocery shopping I didn’t actually have my breath taken away at checkout. I think I got a dozen extra large eggs for $1.09 the other day.
Eggs are still stupid expensive here. And I eat them.
prices seem to have stopped shooting up over here at least…some things slowly getting slightly cheaper again
but its safe to say everythings almost doubled in price since ukraine started
means meat is pretty much off the menu now unless i find a great bargain (or what i’d call used to be what it cost) as i just look at the price and think….yep…not that hungry
eggs for some reason were barely affected over here…still a dozen for somewhere in $2-2.50 range most shops
cheese being nearly twice as expensive as before is hurting me tho….i’ll get a second job before i give up my cheese