Rant #2,871: Money Honey

On Sunday, I went to the supermarket for my mother, something that I have been dong since the early winter,
 
It is just too cold for her to go out and do this right now. When the weather gets warmer, we will both go together, as we had been dong before the cold weather came in.
 
So I went to the supermarket, went up and down her list of things she wanted, got every item on the list, and proceeded to the self-checkout area, ringing up each of the items in the cart.
 
I got to the cucumber, pushed the button to have it looked up—that is how you do produce items—I found the item, and pressed that button so that it would be added onto what I had already rung up.
 
When the price came up, I noted that cucumbers had gone up in price about a quarter—25 cents—from one week to the next, and I as I finished my checkout, I noticed that prices on everything had jumped up from one week to the next, as I spent about $10 to $20 more than I normally would for her (a mix of the usual items she gets and other items that differ from one week to the next).
 
Then I realized why …
 
Easter and Passover are coming up in a few days, aren’t they?
 
Later in the day, I watched a TV news report on the same exact thing—supermarket items had jumped in price this week as the holidays came closer, and one staple of both holidays—eggs—was becoming scarce, supposedly because of a bird flu that had arisen, also impacting the availability of chicken, another holiday staple.
 
Now, I certainly don’t blame the supermarkets for this rise, because they are only charging higher prices because their distributors, the places they get the items from, are charging them higher prices, so who is going to pay for the higher price?
 
But I do believe that like with gas, we are being gouged, probably unnecessarily, because of one reason or another, and yes, I do believe that the convergence of the holidays has given the food industry perfect opportunity to lift the prices to ridiculous levels.
 
And I am hoping that what happened to the price of gas happens to the price of food … or at least what happened in New York happens to the price of food, too.
 
The fuel industry thought that they were being a bit catty when they increased the price of gas by leaps and bounds a few weeks ago, blaming it all on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
 
When I heard that Russia only supplies our country with 4 percent of the fuel that we use, I had to wonder why gas was jumping 20 cents a day to levels we have never seen before.
 
Evidently, I wasn’t the only one questioning these hikes, and the attorney general’s office of New York State, after about two or three weeks of these hikes, said it would be looking into price gouging by this industry …
 
And funny, as gas had risen to over $4 a gallon, all of a sudden, the prices dropped like a free-falling boulder down a steep hill, and at least where I am, you can get gas for $3.79, still an unwieldy and high price, but way better than the $4.25 it was just three weeks ago.
 
Is the food industry price gouging right now due to the confluence of the two holidays?
 
Well, when the price of a cucumber goes up 25 cents in one week, I do have to at least question it.
 
And when my mother’s shopping list price goes up $10 to $20 in one week, yes, I have to question that too.
 
We are in the midst of the worst inflation this country has seen in about 40 years, and everything is going up, up, up, and we do know that not everyone suffers during inflationary periods.
 
People make money in the height of such despair, and I am sure that plenty of people are doing quite well now, on the backs of the general public, which is paying through the nose for everything.
 
And sure, we hear the usual excuses: the war, the price of everything going up, even the printing and the packaging of items, so that increased cost has to be borne by consumers, and, of course, the pandemic, which not only sickens people but makes their pocketbooks ill too, evidently …
 
And there appears to be no cure for this disease, unless government entities get wise to it, and do what happened in New York to the obvious price gouging that was happening at the pump.
 
Many states have revoked various gas taxes to make it easier for the public to pay for fuel, and in New York, the governor’s arms were twisted so much that she had to renege on what she actually wanted to do—nothing—and revoke one of the taxes put on gas for awhile.
 
I don’t know what we can do to help us pay for our groceries, but the whims of the food industry—and their innocuous excuses for raising prices—really should be looked into, because if you can price gouge at the pump, you can certainly do it in the supermarket, too.