No Inflation My Azzz

When I decide it is time to add to my food storage or rotate out some significant amounts it always requires a special trip to get the good deals. My usual haunts for groceries and the like have nothing that offers bulk foods in any way shape or form. To hit a restaurant supply, costco, Sams, what have you requires a special trip in a direction I do not usually go.

When I decide it is time to add in a bulk food purchase I make the arrangements and do but in between those times I will also add smaller amounts of things I store to my normal shopping trips. A pound of split peas here, two pounds of beans there, that kind of thing.

The prices on items like that have almost doubled in the last few years and have doubled easily since 2009. A standard one pound package of dried split peas is now $1.44 at the local grocery store where it was .77 back in 2011 and .59 back in 2009. Dried beans of various varieties have not climbed as much but are in the same ball park.

Without tracking down each item I can tell you from my overall cost analysis I am now spending just about twice as much per trip as I was three years ago. As usual though it is a hard thing to pin down with some products reducing weights instead of prices and frequent long running sales making things impossible to track reliably unless you really put some time into it. The overall effect though is impossible to hide.

I had the pleasure to run into an old co-worker this morning who informed me she had been working 55+ hour weeks since I told them to shove it up their tail pipe. Every Saturday and about a third of the Sundays since I left. It's the same old routine the bosses claim they are so busy yet in that time they have removed the third shift and folded those workers down into the other two shifts. Overall company profits and even gross sales have been down from the quarterly reports all year and even the stock prices have declined some 5%. Yet they are making the first two shifts work more as they refuse to hire new employees while claiming they have too much business. Smoke and mirrors but of course those employees left to deal with it are pushed to their very limits.

This co-worker also informed me she had to put in for a vacation day three weeks in advance just to go grocery shopping which is why I ran into her this morning at the store. She had also been forced to quit her second job she had had for years because of the increased hours.

Bottom line there is less overhead to push three employees into working 160 hours than it is to hire a fourth employee. The shrinking dollar and government expenses are creating a mess and the average worker gets screwed no matter which side he or she is on. Either you have no life or can't afford one. Take your pick.

The end result of course will be the same in both cases on a long enough timeline. The ones not working won't be able to afford anything but by the time inflation is done with us the ones working won't be able to either.

And they will be exhausted besides.

Inflation not only effects the prices we pay for items but it makes our very lives, every hour we are forced to work, cheaper to the one paying for it.

What happens when life becomes cheap?

Keep Prepping Everyone!!!