As I have shared with you recently I don’t get out like I used to…Knee surgery that didn’t work out and I am pretty much confined to a wheelchair here at home. Now for some reason my interest in things that never held that much of my interest are now getting my attention. My wife came back from the store and I immediately rolled in high gear to the kitchen…for a price check. She is a remarkable lady of the house and has been able to continue to put things in the cupboard that I like or finding them in different brands in order to stay on budget. Oh that reminds me that just the other day one of the last two Kmart Stores closed for good. My daughter worked for Kmart while she was in college…used to tip me off on Blue Light Specials, remember those? Well anyway, back to the price check. The wife had already been to Walmart and Aldi and my daughter on her way home from a meeting with clients had stoped at Costco and picked up some items for her there. I had already had lunch and there was a fresh tube of Tums in the drawer so I asked…How much did you spend today? Do you save plastic bags, you know like the ones from the store. Well we have these tube things you can save them in, I am not sure why but lately there doesn’t seem to that many bags to save. Without a pause of any kind her answer was “little over a hundred”! For two of us? Then as I was comparing the number of bags to the money spent, my daughter came in with the stuff for my wife from Costco. One bag…two items Fifty and some change. Some special kind of sugar…it was a big bag… and some of that soap for washing clothes, the kind that comes in a capsule that looks like candy. Now stay with me on this. When I was about seven or eight years old I would go to the grocery store with my grandmother. We walked about ten blocks over to Mc Callie Avenue to a store named Roaches and no I didn’t make the name up. My grandfather had gone to the Western Auto Store and bought a Red Flyer wagon…nothing cheep about Pop. Now I don’t know how much grandmother spent for groceries but let’s just say Pop had to buy a bigger wagon to hold all those paper bags to haul them home. 

Here then is the Ponder for this week. It has caught my attention that most any situation out of the ordinary can cause a rise in cost for goods and services…people talk…Prices…inflation. We have been told that the current Dock Strike will cause a shortage in goods and services…that means higher prices. The list is long but I did notice that gasoline was not mentioned….wait… add that, they must of noticed it also. My Ponder is a simple one. Has there ever been a situation that caused goods and services to go down? Not a sale, those are merchandising gimmicks. But prices really went down…things cost less. Ponder That!

Kurt