Rant #3,088: Follow Me

Well, at least right now, I don’t have any further threats to my mental or financial well-being to report.

Funny, lately I am getting the biggest bang, as far as the Blog is concerned, when I talk about these nuisances as opposed to other stuff.

Statistics demonstrate that when I talk about these things, more people check into my Blog at its site than when I talk about other topics.

I don’t know why that is so, and I am certainly happy that people are reading what I have to say, but if that is the only thing that I wrote about, I personally might go crazy, so I try to write about other things … but honestly, the past few days have been one thing after another after another … so it these things haven’t been too pleasing to me, at least many of you readers are getting a kick out of it.

I guess we all go through these ups and downs, and perhaps these Blog entries hit a nerve with many of you.

So thanks for reading, keep on visiting the site, keep on reading these entries on Facebook, and maybe we will all be the better for it.

It is Thursday, leading up to a big weekend for my family--which I will tell you about tomorrow--and today is food shopping day for me, which brings me my weekly agita test.

Prices are going up, up, up at the supermarket, something that I really don’t have to tell you about, but I, for one, do look at the prices of things, and when I see how high they are on everything, there are things I just pass on because I don’t want my weekly shopping bill to skyrocket.

I also use the local Dollar Store—now really the local Dollar-and-a Quarter Store—to supplement what I buy at the supermarket, and it does help a little bit.

Even with prices at the Dollar Store a quarter more than they used to be, I figure that I save probably anywhere from about $5 to $15 a week shopping at these stores, where my main purchases are things like napkins, cups, snacks, soda and perhaps some food.

I don’t know if you have noticed, but the price of snacks in the regular supermarket has gotten out of hand.

The $5 threshold for a bag of chips has been smashed, and the price of snacks has gotten almost as bad as the price of cereal has in the regular supermarket.

My family eats a lot of snacks, both the healthy kind and the not-so-healthy kind, so snacks are an imperative when I do my shopping.

I try to buy as many snacks as possible in the Dollar Store, because while you are getting a smaller size there, you are also paying about a quarter of what a larger bag of the same thing costs in the regular supermarket, where they do not offer smaller sizes.

So a bag of Wise Potato Chips costs me $1.25 in the Dollar Store, as opposed to the larger offering at the supermarket, which is up to nearly $5 a pop.

Yes, the larger bag would last longer, but perhaps it wouldn’t stay as fresh either, so the smaller bag is perfect for my family’s needs, and you cannot beat the price.

Nonetheless, even with all the price watching I am doing, I continue to spend anywhere from $120 to $150 a week on groceries between the Dollar Store and the regular supermarket.

What is even more distressing is that I go to what is believed to be a discount supermarket—Wal-Mart, which has a stand-alone supermarket that I do my shopping in—so you can only imagine what I would spend each week if I went to King Kullen, Stop and Shop, Shoprite or the like.

I know that shopping at Wal-Mart, I save between $20 and $30 a week, so I would be spending probably upwards of $170 a week if I went to those other supermarkets.

I have to save some money somewhere … and yes, I do feel bad for those SNAP recipients who lost their COVID-19 expenditures this week.

My son was once on the SNAP program—formerly food stamps—so I know how it works. He makes too much money now, which is a joke for examination at another time, so he doesn’t get it now.

But for those people who really rely on the SNAP program to purchase a large part of what they buy in the supermarket each week, that extra SNAP money was a godsend.

That is over now, and they will just have to manage with what they are getting, which based on what my son was getting when he was on the program, isn’t very much.

Yes, people do abuse this program, but now, that period is over, and it is time to do whatever they need to do to feed their families—even the audacity of finding at least a part-time job is on the table right now.

So yes, I do feel for these people, but like when Unemployment was basically over-paying people to not find a job during the height of the pandemic—my son and I were part of that, but unlike many people, even some I know personally, we never gave up looking for something during that horrid period in our lives, but no one would hire us--that day was over long ago, and now, SNAP people have to make a decision about what they are going to do to put food on the table.

And being that as it is, the choice for many of them is an easy one.