I spotted this story earlier this week: Joe Scarborough visibly shocked after finding out what the price of butter is: ‘Is it wrapped in gold?’:
MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough was visibly shocked when his wife and co-host Mika Brzezinski revealed how high the cost of butter has gotten in the last four years.
“A few weeks ago… somebody who was going to be voting for Kamala Harris came up to me and said ‘oh my God, Trump’s going to win… I go to the grocery store butter is over $3” the former Florida congressman said.
“I kinda laughed and I said well that’s kinda reductive isn’t it, I said it to myself,” Scarborough continued.
“It’s $7… I’m just saying it’s 7,” Brzezinski interrupted.
“Butter is $7… What, is it framed in gold?” Scarborough replied incredulously, with a look of shock on his face.
I related to this not-a-poem about my mother-in-law’s response to recent beef prices, which shocked her because 1) she doesn’t order beef that often and (here’s my buried thesis for this short blog post, if a short blog post even warrants a “thesis”) 2) she orders things on the Internet.
I have to wonder how much this affects the experience of inflation amongst retirees, the laptop class, and the young who are used to ordering things from Amazon or from Walmart or other places that deliver things. Not only do you get dynamic pricing, which even in non-inflationary times will charge you the maximum that the algorithms think you will pay (and the prices are always going a little up or a little down based on whether it wants to entice you to buy or not) or the things are on a subscription where they just come regardless of the price and the bill is just a line on a credit card statement (if one even looks closely at them).
Going to the store, though, you see not only the thing you’re going to buy, but also that the prices of comparable things, even the store brands, have gone up (and how much they’re still going up). You also see that the prices of things you don’t buy have gone up and how much (except for wine, for some reason: a bottle of Cocobon Red Blend, for example, has only gone up fifty cents in the last fifteen years, and Yellow Tail brands have not gone up at all).
Meanwhile, here in the real world, where I do try to leave my house a couple of times a week to go shopping, I see cheap cuts of beef for $7 a pound (generally on sale), I think I’d better stock up and put some of that in my freezer.
