I don’t have a car, so the cost of gas doesn’t directly affect me.
I do, however, notice slight increases in the cost of other items. While our dollar becomes less valuable due to inflation the cost of gas increases the cost of shipping of just 'bout everything we buy.
First off:
Milk. I don’t know the exact amount it costs now, but its over 4 bucks a gallon here. A year ago it was less.
Bread. Up a quarter in the past month at a few places I shop at. (also, pizza just went up 25 cents a slice at the pizza place I’ve been going to for years).
Beer. At the local convenience store a 24 pack went up two bucks. Cheaper beers, for some odd reason, had an even higher price leap. All at once. I asked why and they said the cost of hops or something had gone up dramatically. If its true, why?
I have a car but don’t drive much since I work from home, so gas prices are something of a novelty every couple of weeks or so. What I did notice was paying $4 for some dam hamburger buns? What the hell?
Kale. No kidding. Here’s a commodity that appears to have at least something of a supply and no discernible demand. It’s the growing season for greens. It was $1.79 per bunch two weeks ago and $3.09 for a smaller bunch day before yesterday.
Poop bags! I had to buy some yesterday and they were $4.79 for four rolls of poop bags! But, to comfort me, the package did say they were “15% bigger.” WTF? I have corgis, not mastiffs!
Ground beef is around $3/lb here, I hadn’t bought it in a while, but was shocked when I had to buy some recently.
Eggs are way more expensive, too. A regular dozen of eggs here is around 2 bucks. Oddly enough, the fancy organic ones haven’t gone up, they’re still about 3 dollars a dozen, so it makes it easy to justify the extra expense.
And my guacamole! I used to buy this delicious pre-made guacamole from the produce department, but now it’s 4 bucks a box! A box is technically like 6 servings, but it comes with two pouches inside, and I just dump it into a bowl and lick clean. :o
We’re now starting to feel the effects of the rice shortage. I paid over $7 for a 2kg bag of jasmine rice last week, where the same bag would’ve been less than $5 a few months ago.
Plus I had to go to two different stores before I even found a bag! Mind you, I was shopping in an ethnic area with a high proportion of Southeast Asian, Vietnamese and Chinese families, so the demand for rice is already quite high under normal circumstances, but I’ve never ever seen bare shelves like this. Apparently it’s a combo of people shipping bags to their families back home and hoarding for their own use.
Fruits and veg are still reasonably priced, but I worry about what’ll happen once winter comes along and the local produce dries up. I may be living on apples, squash and potatoes come January, rather than pay a hefty price for produce trucked in from Cali.
Maybe they expect you to get more use out of them by using them 2 or 3 times.
Eew!!
I give my dog 1 can of unsalted green beans every night (it’s great “diet food” for dogs!) and the price went up from 55 cents/can to 63 cents/can in just 2 weeks. Almost a 15% increase…just like weed. Hmm…
I’m sure the reason the mass-produced beer/eggs go up more is because their pricepoi8nt is much more dependent on things like freight and economies of scale, whereas the boutique/organic items are more priced around labour and cachet. So gas price increases hit the mass stuff where they can’t reasonably soak it up.
Here, milk and bread have noticeably gone up. Also imports like chocolate and coffee.
When we go for walks, I try to persuade them to do their business at the same time, because a “one-bagger” is more economical, but my pleas fall on deaf ears.
No, I may re-use fabric softener sheets. I may re-use drinking straws (I take it out of my morning juice and stick it into my lunchtime soda can). But I draw the line at recycling poop bags. Fuck you, Al Gore.
Beef. No decent sales on beef anymore, and all the beef dishes in the Japanese restaurant we went to for lunch Saturday had new and higher prices written in. Food in general is bad also. Notice that few of the sales in the circulars are for actual food anymore?
I’m okay with bread prices since I buy mine at the Orowheat outlet store a few blocks from work, and they seem to have held the line.
I went to order some of those closet organizer thingers, they’re like plastic dresser drawers that are stackable. The ones I wanted were going to be $55.00 for a set of 4. Not too bad I thought, the shipping was going to be $52.99. I don’t know if that’s an increase since I’ve never shopped for them online before, but that was insane.
I absolutely had to have a new box of clarinet reeds - no time to mail order, so I walked into the local retail music store, and a box of 10 Vandorens was 23 dollars. It’s criminal, I tell ya!
It is true. There is currently a hops shortage that is putting the crunch on brewers. Microbreweries are being hit especially hard. A Google search for ‘hops shortage’ will pull up lots and lots of articles on the subject. It’s the hot topic in brewing circles these days.
There are a few reasons for the shortage. Like any other agricultural product, it’s susceptible to a Boom and Bust cycle.
At one time there was a glut, which caused growers to reduce acreage. In the last 10 years or so hop acreage has shrunk by something like 50%.
Bad weather in Europe caused last year’s harvest to be significantly less than expected.
And there was a fire in a warehouse in Yakima, WA a couple of years ago that destroyed something like 2 million pounds of hops.
Many brewers are reformulating to cope, and Sam Adams offered some of their hops at their cost to microbreweries.
I wouldn’t expect the cheaper beers to be hit too hard by this though. All of the large breweries have long term contracts with growers, securing their supply. It’s the craft brewers and homebrewers that are really being hit.
This is an age old gambit with online and mail-order merchants – entice you with a good price, then rape you with shipping charges. They’re hoping you won’t notice. Shop elsewhere with an online outfit that charges honest shipping costs.
I did a little more searching and found the exact item in a local store. The only shipping will be gas to get there…I hope that doesn’t end up costing too much!
I’m nodding along to a lot already listed. Easter is generally a great time to cholesterol our brains out, we do quiches and egg salad sandwiches and all sorts of baking. Why? Because eggs are always crazy cheap at Easter for all the egg-coloring that’s about to commence. Not this year, instead of the normal low holiday price of about fifty cents a dozen, they’re hanging around two bucks.
Coffee is another one, I’d only buy name brands on sale anyway, but it was a sale price of five or six bucks instead of the normal price of seven or eight. My local Kroger’s is now selling Maxwell House for twelve bucks, and I found myself all excited finding it on sale somewhere for only seven bucks.
Not that I’m living in cattle land, but I’m still seeing decent sales on steaks, $1.99 sales on ground chuck, etc. Milk and green peppers are stupid high, though.
A few items at Trader Joe’s have gone up noticeably; Lavash (flatbread for wraps) went from $1.69 to $1.99 to 2.29. Six packs of Hansen's soda went up .40. Happily, Two Buck Chuck is still $1.99.