This week is grocery week again.  It’s becoming a greater and greater challenge to plan for grocery shopping, because prices are rising so rapidly that I can’t keep up; I don’t know, anymore, what things are going to cost, until I actually get in the store.  (It’s too bad I’m not a futures broker; predictions seem to be easy to make nowadays: is it a necessity?  Then the price is going up.)

Just a couple of small examples: Olives and tuna. A year ago, I paid 60 cents a can for sliced or chopped black olives.  The price had inched up a tad over the course of the year — to maybe 62 or 64 cents.  But then the last time I went to buy groceries, they were 78 cents a can!  And tuna.  The store brand used to be 48 cents.  It, too, had inched up a little over the course of the year, and was at 50 cents a can.  But the last time I went in, it was 58 cents a can (and sold out, so I had to buy the name brand for 64 cents).  Now, because we’re talking cents, that doesn’t seem like a lot.  But that’s a huge percentage!  When everything is going up like that, it makes a tremendous impact on the cost of groceries overall.

I think it’s because the cost of gasoline has skyrocketed.  And this, in turn, has caused a push for ethanol, which makes a greater demand for corn, which pushes the cost of corn up, which, in turn, pushes the cost of other grains up, and… well, you get the picture.  (And amid all that, the car companies are making cars that get worse and worse gas mileage; go figure — but that’s a subject for another post.)