Am I gobsmacked by prices because I’m old or because they’ve gone through the roof? It’s a question I find I’m asking myself with increasing frequency these days as the cost of pretty much everything has risen substantially.
When you get to be of a certain vintage, you’ve lived long enough that you can remember what something might have cost decades earlier. Admittedly, those memories can be a bit fuzzy, but they nonetheless serve as frame of reference from which to compare to present day prices.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s a house or a hotel room, a beer or a box of cereal, it’s hard not to think back to a time when those items, and everything else for that matter, were far more palatable on the pocketbook. It stands to reason that inflation pushes everything higher as the years go by, so my wife and I will often take turns reminding each other that it is 2024 and that’s simply what things cost nowadays.
However, there are times when it’s seems like it’s less about my age showing and more to do with a jaw-dropping rise in prices in recent times, a situation that can happen anywhere, but one that seems to occur most frequently at the grocery store.
My wife does the bulk of the grocery shopping, but I tag along every so often and on the rare occasion I go it alone, albeit these are times when we’re only in need of a few things, which may or may not be what I end up bringing home.
When I find myself in the supermarket, I tend to home in on certain items – cereal, yogurt, fruit and Coke Zero, among others -- that are part of my everyday, so I have a pretty good handle on the price of certain things, but I’m clueless on others.
About a month ago, I was surprised, and not in a good way, when the five pears I had put in the bag rang in north of $8, while more recently, four nectarines cost me that much. When I gripe about the prices, my wife will often respond that if we’re willing to spend money on items that have dubious nutritional value, think licorice, then surely we can buck up for fruit.
She’s right but it seems like it’s no longer just the price of cherries, but pretty much everything in the produce department, that can take your breath away, with the exception of bananas, which didn’t get the inflation memo and continue to be a bargain.
I also do a fair bit of griping in the soft drinks aisle because it wasn’t that long ago – I'm talking a decade or so – that I could regularly buy three 12-packs of Coke Zero for $10 whereas now I’m paying $7 or $8 for just one case.
I get that the cost of everything is going to rise over time, but the recent surge has made the good old days, as well as their price tags, a distant memory, even if they weren’t that long ago.
