10/12/09 Stockholm, Sweden – Perhaps it’s nice to hear the recovery song and dance on television, but it’s getting harder to finance your grocery shopping list every week.
If only we could pay our bills with optimism.
Hat tip to The Reformed Broker for spotting this main street not-so-recovery.
Rocky Vega is a regular contributor to The Daily Reckoning. Previously, he was founding publisher of UrbanTurf and RFID Update, which he operated from Brazil, Chile, and Puerto Rico, and associate publisher of FierceFinance. He specialized in direct marketing at MBI, facilitated MIT Sloan School of Management programs, and has been featured on CBS. Vega graduated with honors from Harvard University, where he was on the board of Let’s Go Publications and directed business programs involving McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Harvard Business School faculty. He is also enrolled at the Stockholm School of Economics.
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I think the food stamp program is doing a good job of propping up food prices.
Next they should do one showing a food shopper in California holding up an IOU from the state government asking how much food that will get them.
We will reap what we sow (or hallucinate).
PS….I’m a Atheist.
It’s taken a solid year for the tanking economy to affect supermarket prices. I finally see some real sales where I can actually save a decent amount of money. I take this as a sign that things must be pretty bad. And it’s worse for non-food products. The local men’s clothing store had been running “buy one, get one free” for suits. Now the ad is “buy one, get TWO free.”
When I started my blog 1 in 9 Americans were on food stamps
It is now 1 in 11
Folks, my blog is just over 2 years old.
Welcome to the recovery.
I am remembering a moment back from my childhood in Detroit (1968). We were in line at the checkout counter of my local grocery store. The woman ahead of us was paying with food stamps. She became indignant that her foodstamps did not pay for her bag of dogfood. So she dumped the dogfood off the counter, leaves the check-out line and comes back with a large portion of ground chuck for her dog. It was the same package we were paying for our weekly family meat budget. We paid with cash. It’s a memory I will never forget, not the expression on my Mother’s face.
I am smiling as I write this. You see, I am on DHS’ “Terror Suspect List” because I STOCKPILE food and nonfood items. Groceries expensive? That’s okay, I can dig into my pile, and then replace later at a sale. As Howard Ruff writes, “It’s the investment you can eat.” So, enjoy your Hamburger Helper, I’m dining on flank steak tonight!