The price is not right

By Linda Cicoira

     As the cost of everything continues to rise, I have found one salvation. My favorite cold cereal has gone down by $1.75 a box. I grabbed three boxes when I saw this during a recent visit to the grocery store. I considered that $3 price tag a reason to celebrate.

     The product was not outdated or in a smaller box. But I fear it may soon be discontinued or everyone else will learn how good it is and buy it up. I’m not telling the brand or flavor. So, don’t even ask what kind I prefer to eat for breakfast.

    Last weekend at another local store, I saw a 52-ounce milk container posing as a half-gallon. For those of you who are thinking about how many ounces are in a half-gallon, it is 64, not 52 ounces. Half gallons of ice cream have long been a pint short and are sometimes $5 for Breyer’s lactose-free vanilla. I like to sprinkle Ovaltine powder on that. The chocolate or malted drink mix costs $5.77 a can or more locally. Of course, it was cheaper back in the 1960s. If you have an empty amber-colored Ovaltine jar with the label from six decades ago, you can post it for sale for $135. So yes, pack rats can rule! The metal container from 1921 can be gotten for $65. I can’t explain that.

     I’m afraid I will be showing my age when I say I can remember when paper towels were $1 for five rolls. It was the 1970s. Now if you can get a six-pack of them for $10, you are feeling lucky enough to buy a Powerball ticket, which costs $3 now, instead of $1.

     If I were better at it, I would be making my own bread. The so-called healthy stuff is now priced at between $4 and $6 a loaf. A few years ago, a 100-year-old man told me that when he was a boy, he would walk a couple of miles to a store in Craddockville to buy a loaf of bread for three cents. It wasn’t sliced. He said that came later. At that time, pay for a day of work digging and picking potatoes by hand was 50 cents. At that rate you could buy almost 16 loaves a day. Now you would have to pay $96 for the bread.

     When that same guy was in his mid-20s, he bought his first car, a Ford Model T. That was in the early 1940s. The reported price was about $800 back then when a gallon of gas was 18 cents. Model T vehicles produced from 1909 to 1927 have sold for as much $110,000 in the last five years, according to classic.com. Nowadays, car experts are comparing the Model T to today’s Tesla Model 3. Those new cars are listed at between $45,000 and $68,000.

    Gas prices have come down. We can all agree we will be happier when they drop down some more. At this writing, local prices ranged from $3.49 to $3.69 for a gallon of regular. I paid more than $4 a gallon earlier this year. When I was a child, my mother would pull up to the pump and ask for a dollar’s worth. That would be pumped for her and her oil would get checked by the attendant.

     Hamburgers when I was about eight or nine years old were 19 cents at a place my mother took us occasionally for a supper treat. Prices and sizes of burgers have varied over the years. An online menu from a local fast-food place showed $1.59 for the thinnest patty-sandwich.

     According to an inflation site about eggs, the average price was $2.90 for twelve. I paid $2.49 for a dozen extra-large eggs this week. The pizza dough I like went from 99 cents to $1.79 in recent months at one grocery and is $2.49 at another store.  The price for butter is outrageous! It was $4.48 for 16 ounces of the generic brand this week. In 2021, those same four sticks were about $3.18.

     In 1968, my parents rented a pretty nice house in an Eastern Shore town for $50 a month. I’ve seen much smaller places that now go for $1,200 a month.

     Planning to send those much-loved Christmas cards this year? Or are you going digital? At 60 cents, with the threat of 63 cents for a postage stamp, I don’t see myself getting many. But hey, your news is still free at WESR, Coastal Country and ShoreDailyNews.com.