Nonsense. There are plenty of banana varieties.
Where I live, milk sometimes drops below $1 a gallon.
Also steam video games during holiday sales. you can get some good games for <$5
If you buy them from the store, sure. Pastured eggs are about that.
If you actually go to the farm and get them, depending on the time of year and your relationship with the farmer, they can be much much less.
A number of my clients have farms, and they will ask if I want them to bring me eggs. They usually charge me less than $2 a dozen. Some just give them to me free.
Some things are even cheaper in Canada. In the fall we once bought cabbage for 9c a pound, bought 70 pounds to make kraut. Two litres of store-brand pop for 39c Canadian. Asian imports like Basmati rice or olive oil at half the US price.
I cant stop myself from saving the real cool ones, like rum bottles…
Tin Foil is outrageously expensive, but the Op was talking about Aluminum foil.
Sam Vines has a homily about that:
https://moneywise.com/a/boots-theory-of-socioeconomic-unfairness#:~:text=In%20reference%20to%20the%20Captain,dollars%20a%20month%20plus%20allowances.&text=This%20was%20the%20Captain%20Samuel,Boots’%20theory%20of%20socioeconomic%20unfairness.
"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."
Looking at the web site for my local grocery store, the big roll of Reynolds Wrap (200 square feet) is $9.99. A smaller roll (75 square feet) is $3.99. Their store brand is $7.49 for the big roll, and $3.19 for the smaller roll. When you’re buying Reynolds Wrap at Dollar Tree, are you getting the 200’, or the 75’? (Either way, I’m sure it’s less expensive than at the grocery store.)
We use aluminum foil quite a bit (pretty much, every time we’re heating up something in the oven), and a 200’ roll lasts us about a year. So, even at grocery store prices, it’s an incredible value for the price.
In the '90s, I worked for Helene Curtis, a personal-care products manufacturer – their best-selling brand was Suave (haircare products, skincare, anti-perspirant, etc.). Suave was the leading “value brand” in the category, and had a long-running slogan of “Does what theirs does, for a lot less.”
At that time, you could usually buy a 16 ounce bottle of Suave shampoo or conditioner for 99 cents (and usually under 80 cents at Walmart); our more expensive brands (like Salon Selectives and Finesse) were around $2.50 - $3.50. And, the quality of Suave products was very close to (and, sometimes, identical to) that of our more expensive products. For their price, Suave products were hugely over-engineered, and were much better than the other “value brands,” all because the company culture took that ad slogan very literally – we had a mandate that Suave needed to be as good as mainstream brands.
In '95, we were working with a consulting group on determining the future direction for the company (the answer to that question wound up being, “sell it to Unilever”). I’d been with the company for six years at that point, and one of my roles, in the market research group, entailed me becoming the company’s expert on our historical sales trends. One day, during a work session with the consultants, I had this conversation with one of them:
Interesting history. I buy suave products specifically because they are about a third the cost of the other name brands, and usually less than store brand as well.
Never found it to be inferior to the more expensive stuff.
Out of habit more than necessity now, so I don’t really pay as much attention to the price, but I think that the big 28oz shampoo bottle (I just checked the size in my shower) was maybe 3 bucks or so. Pretty sure everything else of that size is pushing close to $10.
The roll in my cupboard that I bought last week Tuesday is 40 feet, which works out to $5 for 200’ or $2 for 80 feet. They had rolls of the heavy duty stuff for a buck but I believe it was only 20 feet.
The off brand stuff they sell there is longer (I believe 65 feet if memory serves) but while useful it’s quality is not as good as Reynolds. I wouldn’t care but I have a wife. You know how they are about such things.
I’ve also noticed that what is at one Dollar Tree may not be at another. That’s kind of a pain.
Originally there was the “Penny store”, where everything was a penny.
Then there was the “Five and Dime”, where everything was 5-10 cents.
Now there is a “Dollar store”.
And now you know how the industry copes with inflation.
Panama disease decimated the Gros Michel, which was replaced by the Cavendish. There is now a variant of the fungus attacking the Cavendish.
But there are dozens, if not hundreds, of other banana cultivars, many with inherent resistance to Panama disease. Many of them are sold in the US as “plantains”, or “cooking bananas”.
So there are in fact many, many varieties of bananas out there that will continue to exist even if the Cavendish goes the way of the Gros Michel. They will, however, taste somewhat different.
[hijack] This reminded me of an event from my past. My dad was meeting with several executives from Alcoa. He said “tin foil” and they immediately, and indignantly, corrected him.
Carry on. [/hijack]
I definitely agree with the price of stamps and of gasoline. Yeah, I remember paying 50¢ a gallon in the 70s, but I also remember wages being lots lower then. And I remember buying a roll of 100 stamps for $8 about that time. But even at whatever stamps cost today (they cost “Forever”, right?) it’s a bargain. The things I can’t do on line will be taken from my door to their destination, whether a few miles from here or across the country, usually within a few days. I find that impressive.
The price of a gallon of gasoline has rarely ever been more than that for a gallon of milk. For milk, you just take it out of a $1500 cow, heat it, chill it, bottle it, and truck it to a store likely less than a few hours away. For gasoline, there are multi-billion dollar exploration, drilling, pumping, pipeline and/or tanker costs before the raw material even makes it’s way to a $5-10 billion refinery before finding it’s way to a tanker truck depot and your local station. Yet somehow, it’s the dairy farmers that are famous for going bankrupt while the richest people in the word are in the oil/gasoline business.
In the Philippines, bananas cos 60-80 cents a pound in street markets, $1.00 to 1.20 at a supermarket. I can see them growing from my house.
The US-Canada pricing differential is an interesting dynamic. I go to Canada frequently, since my kids live there (although haven’t been there since pre-pandemic). I’d say 80% of my wardrobe is from Canadian stores, as the exchange rate differential makes the clothing I like far more affordable, despite the much higher sales taxes. Meanwhile, many Canadians near the NY border flock to the US side to shop to save money by avoiding those taxes. Somehow, the exchange rate difference doesn’t seem to concern them.
This reminds me of a 99-cent store that opened up about a decade ago near me. Below the main sign, the smaller sign first said “everything 99 cents or less”. About a year later, they changed it to “everything 99 cents or higher”. My kids and I would joke that they could be selling BMW’s out of that place.
Lots of things are strangely cheap, at least here in the U.S.
Like food. Just regular ol’ food you buy at the grocery. As a percentage of income, it is really cheap, for most people. Someone mentioned bananas… I remember when bananas were 39 cents a pound in the 1980s. And today they’re around the same price. Amazing.
Vehicles. I can buy a safe, reliable car for under $3K on the used market.
I mean, just all kinds of things… gasoline, televisions, clothing.
Automation is behind a lot of this. Go to youtube and look for “carrot harvester” or “pancake stacking robot”, and you’ll see jobs that used to be done by people that are now being done by machine. I saw another robot in a fish processing plant that used lasers to assess the varying cross-sectional area of a huge salmon filet, and then decided (based on that cross-section) where to place cuts so that each piece came out to exactly two ounces, no matter how weirdly shaped the original hunk of fish might be.
When it comes to designing new products, computer-aided design and manufacturing have sped up the process and eliminated a lot of labor along the way, and also reduced waste. It used to be that you designed a part with a lot of wasted material because there was uncertainty about its performance, or because it was too hard to fabricate it with the best shape, or both. Now you can simulate a part’s behavior before ever having to make one, and you can machine it to exactly the shape you want with relative ease.
Microsoft Windows.
Even now, it’s still THE main operating system for PC desktops and laptops around the world, even if a handful of people fool around with Linux and other operating systems.
It’s literally one of a handful of things you can’t do without on a PC, and the ONLY thing for which there is no competitor of any real note.
That means that “what the market will bear” is probably quite a bit higher than the roughly $100 that it costs, but for reasons known only to Microsoft*, they’ve always kept the price low like that for DOS and all the other flavors of Windows over the years. They could easily charge $300 for it, and people (especially corporate customers) would pay.
Sure, but that should apply across the board. If US carrot growers are using these whiz-bang machines instead of cheap immigrant labor, they ought to be able to undercut foreign carrot growers and drive prices down everywhere on carrots.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think it has more to do with what we’re conditioned to believe things “should” cost in terms of relative price. We think that bananas should be less than 50 cents a lb, or maybe twice the cost of apples, or something like that. So producers/distributors do their damnedest to keep prices there. Meanwhile, consumers in the UK are used to very high computer part prices. So the manufacturers and distributors price them accordingly there, and lower here for the exact same part. Another example is that we tend to think that passable wine should be somewhat pricey- $8-10 per bottle or so, because it’s typically not something we drink commonly with meals. Not so in Europe; inexpensive table wine is usually passable and considerably cheaper than wine of equivalent quality in the US.
Oh, that’s another one: computer/device games. I’m gonna get into “when I was your age” mode here, but back when a kid, it was something like $40-$50 to buy a Nintendo or Commodore 64 game. That’s almost $100 in 2020 dollars. Even the shitty budget games were generally $5-$10 ($10-$20 today). And people start bitching now when a game in the iOS App Store gets beyond a couple of bucks. The range of games that are just ninety-nine cents in the app store is just incredible. And, if you can stand ads or in-app purchases, you also have the free stuff. As a kid in the late 80s, I would have lost my shit at the economy and choice of electronic diversions we have now.