Most of us are wise to the fact that when you go to a grocery store these days, the size of the packaging of goods such as potato chips, cheese, cereal, frozen food, etc. gets smaller, yet the prices rise faster than a hot air balloon. The corporations who run this country must think we’re all a bunch of suckers. Maybe we are, because we let them get away with it — or our politicians do. But what are we to do? We have to eat.
A visit to the local supermarket is like a game of double your money. Eggs for example. I bought some last week labeled “large organic.” Pre-COVID, they’d have been labeled “small organic.” Are the chickens getting smaller or are they trained to lay smaller eggs?
A benchmark for the shrinking product is that noble American candy bar, you know the one that “satisfies.” It is now a shadow of its former self. Pre-COVID, it could have doubled as a small surfboard; post-COVID, it would not satisfy a starving mouse.
If the price remained the same or shrank with the product, that would be okay, but does that ever happen? No. Most of the food companies make enough profit to run a small country, so you’d think they might take a hit for their loyal customers. Of course then the shareholders would be unhappy and we don’t want that do we? So Joe Public, as always, takes the hit. There’s been so many hits during COVID and since the grifter-in-chief came to power, even Muhammad Ali would have thrown in the towel.
In a local supermarket, I used to buy a certain protein bar. It was never very big in the first place, but covid shrank it to three-quarters the size it was. They didn’t even bother to shrink the wrapping, so a quarter of the packaging is air. But, I suppose air is free. Or is it?
Take the humble bar of soap. When I was a lad growing up in England, a bar of Pear’s soap would last my brothers and I for months. Now you buy a packet of soaps at a “big box” store in quantities so large that you’d think there’d be enough suds to wash the grime off a small army, but no, the bar itself has shrunk into a sort of concave shape, which they say “fits the contours of one’s body.” And, the soap seems to dissolve as soon as it makes contact with anything, like water for example. I don’t know about smoke getting in your eyes … but soap certainly gets up my nose!
The humble computer printer is a wonderful piece of technology, whose price has been falling for decades. You can buy a decent printer for under $200 including ink cartridge. I thought that was great until the cartridge ran out of ink faster than the tank of gas in my car. I went to purchase a new cartridge and it cost almost as much as the printer itself. And this was before the “military excursion” of choice sent gas prices rising faster than a Space-X rocket.
A gallon of petrol, hovers around $6 as I type this. An ink cartridge is just a few thimbles derived from the same stuff, but at a price that would have covered a down payment on a house 50 years ago. I hope some wise reader can explain this, because I sure as heck can’t. Don’t we subsidize fossil fuel companies, to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars? Maybe, we should ask for our money back, or our politicians should, but they won’t.
The fossil fuel industry profits skyrocket, while many in this country can barely afford to eat. And have you noticed (of course you have) that the price of gas never really comes down.
Network TV, a vast wasteland of mediocrity, if there ever was, has become one big advertising billboard, only to be superseded by various streaming services that bombard us with the most inane commercials from penile dysfunction cures, to reverse mortgages, to used cars, with no sensitivity as to what people are watching. There might be an emotional scene in which the hero dies or a dog drowns, and before our tears have time to flow, up pops up an ad for some new drug (with so many side effects why would you want to take it in the first place), anti-aging vitamins, or one of the 2,000 candidates who ran for Governor of California.
Of course, if you wish to pay a king’s ransom then you can have a streaming service without ads. So they say. Does anyone pay attention to these ads. Not me. I turn the volume down and go make a cup of tea. I drink a lot of tea.
