I'm no economic scholar, so I'm not even going to try to talk about what's going on in the financial markets and with the big boys in the worlds of investing, mortgages and insurance.
What I do know -- what we all know -- is that what we pay at the pump, the grocery store and the checks we write out to our utility companies are all going through the roof, in increments of 10 cents here, a quarter more there. (Or $84 per month more on my We Energies bill. Whatever.)
It seems like every time I go to the store lately, the prices on the basic grocery items I always buy are inching up on me. It's just small enough that if you don't really look at the label on the shelf and think about what you paid last time, you might not even notice it. When it's all added up at the register, you notice, but you don't necessarily see that couple of cents on each individual item.
Just for fun (sick fun, I admit), I decided to track one item on my grocery bill. Just one. There's a certain kind of granola I like to buy, mix it into some vanilla yogurt and eat it every morning for breakfast. (My husband says this mixture looks like a bowl of bird poop, but I digress.)
Anyway, a bag of the granola is 12 ounces.
In July, it was $4.79 per bag.
By August, it had increased to $5.09.
Today, it's $5.25.
In two months, it's up nearly 50 cents.
That's just for that one item -- one of 30 that I bought on my shopping trip this week. In fairness, I didn't track the others to see how much they've risen in two months, but I would imagine that most, if not all, have increased by some percentage in the past six months.
This price creep has me thinking: How soon until I consider my granola a luxury item? When it hits $5.50 per bag? $6? What about when the staples hit these kinds of number? Milk's close to $4 per gallon. What will happen when it hits $5? It's near that in some parts of the country.
While everyone else is worrying about the big powerhouse financial giants, we're worrying about those of us who are not. Think there's going to come a time when they worry about us?
