This is what finally did it for me: the $300 basket of groceries. I went to the local Publix last Friday for my usual week's supply of food, plus $30 worth of batteries, and did a total freak out at the checkout counter. '"There must be a mistake," I say to the kid behind the register...
"Huh?" sighs the checkout dude stretching out the very long receipt for me to see. There's no mistake. And yes, he says I am the hundredth person to ask that question today.
Previously $150 for a basket of groceries had seemed ridiculously high but it's an amount I am used to paying now that we have a variety of family members with various needs. Jason only drinks rice milk, I like fat free, my three year old drinks whole milk and the baby needs formula. You get the idea. We are a family of consumers in a country full of them.
But could the cost of groceries literally have doubled in less than a month's time?
And, do we really need four kinds of milk?
This scary grocery store jaunt came just after I filled my tiny ten-gallon tank... for $52? (What used to cost $15 not three years ago, before the birth of my first child, is now nearly 4x as expensive?) We bought the "tiny" Honda CRV because it was the smallest of the SUVs. Now I wish we'd thought even smaller.
How can this be happening? How could I not have seen it coming? Everyone we knew in bigger cities had been asking us if we'd experienced the worsening economy yet in Athens. We hadn't felt the pinch in the past few years as many of our New York and LA counterparts had. And I have to say it has hit our small town sudden and hard.
I walk my neighborhood for exercise so I see what everyone is up to on a daily basis. Over the past few weeks (and yes it's literally weeks) the typical one or two for sale signs have increased by the dozen. People we know are getting offers they "can't refuse" and then downsizing or moving out of town-- does this mean foreclosure?
When I moved to Athens from SF ten years ago, I had to wait an entire year to find ONE HOUSE for sale in Five Points. I bought my first home after I heard rumor of a listing through the third realtor I had hired. There was not even a sign out front. I bought it without seeing the inside which is something I would never do today-- but I really wanted a house on a particular street in Five Points and it was the only one I'd heard of on the market in over a year .
Now when I take my morning walk it goes: three houses for sale, one not, four for sale, two not...
Some of our restaurant-owner friends once envied for their seeming never-ending-stream of new stuff, cars, homes, rooms-to-go, new clothes, jewelry, multiple annual vacations... tell us of the 3x rise in operations costs due to the increased cost of food and transport. The stay-at-home-mom wives I know are looking for full time jobs. The restaurants and retail stores around Athens are empty. We went to Jason's Deli last Friday at 5:30 (Athens' family rush hour) where there's a huge and good salad bar and we were the first ones there. Only three other families entered the restaurant over the next hour. AC-a-blasting for no one.
I called my dad to tell him that groceries in Athens had doubled overnight. Gas had tripled in two months. And for the first time in my working life, I was scared. He told me to buy a deep freezer and fill it up. He really knows how to save-- I don't know any other American who does.
Yes, I had my days of struggle back when I worked as an untrained camera operator on the overnight shift hoping to someday be somebody. I made minimum wage then and lived off of peanut butter and rice cakes. But I was raised knowing how to look at the right hand side of the menu-- it just seemed like another challenge to save money back then. I was young and everyone I knew was struggling.
But by the time my second job came around, Clinton was in charge. I arrived in California and my salary had literally tripled overnight. Three years later it doubled again. I traveled to Japan to design random tv-related stuff and stayed for 90 days in the Shinjuku Hilton, gratis with a per diem and a comped mini-bar. Since I had no expenses in Japan I came back with the mother-lode of cash. I saved enough money during the 8 years Clinton was president to move my stuff back across the country to Georgia, buy a new car with cash, take a year off, and put $25k down on a house. I then landed a great job in my new tiny town at close to the same salary I'd had in SF with half the expenses. I saved a little over time, but not enough. But with times this good, who's worried about the future... right?
That is until Bush came into office.
Since then I've watched everything shrink-- except inflation. Customer service was the first to go. With the downsizing of the corporations, and outsourcing to India it doesn't really feel like there was anything left worth spending money on. I've had to return two computers, a fan, a phone and some shoes because they fell apart within weeks of my owning them. Since then I've watched retail (and some food and drug) production moved to China. Every clothing item no matter whether from Wal-Mart or Macy's was coming from China and suddenly had a life expectancy of three washes. It was actually becoming depressing to go shopping-- half the stuff on the racks was already missing a button or had loose threads. Quality was zero but at least the costs were low, right? Even the drive-thrus-- once beacons of convenience-- were becoming mini windows of shame and misery. It felt like they were throwing the burger/taco/etc at me.
Everything is shrinking, tanking, falling...
But still. Even after gas skyrocketed I thought, well, we can work around that. At least we bought our plane tickets to the west coast for summer vacation last winter. It hasn't really effected us yet, right?
Then came the $300 basket of groceries.
It hit me so hard I made a pact on the spot.
As of July 1 I would (try to) stop spending money. I will eat what's in my fridge, pantry, freezer before buying anything else at the grocery store. We will limit ourselves to purchasing just dairy, some meats (twice a week) and fresh produce at the farmers market every Saturday. I will carpool. We will walk to the post office, bank, etc. I will stop buying drive through fancy coffee. No fast food period.
We'll find free things to do with the kids. I will cut back on my babysitter time. I will (heavy heavy sigh since we don't drink and it's our only escape) give up our weekly date night visit to the movie theater and instead watch movies at home. I will set the thermostat up to 78 (from the cold 70 I like in the summer). We'll use the fans if it gets really hot.
We have to do this for July and then again when we get back from our trip out west. We bought our plane tickets at the end of last year for $189 each! We planned this research and job seeking trip before gas prices went from $1.50 to $4! We had decided to take the kids with us to get a vacation in while we were at it. And the babysitter. Now I keep thinking SUV? Los Angeles? 5 people. $5/gallon. Arrrrr.
The thought now makes me feel a little ill. Thus the month of pre-travel deprivation .
I have done this for one day now but my thoughts are heading off the grid. My husband laughs but I am seriously researching solar power and so on. But we are both self-employed. We have two kids. And scary stuff is happening to our economy. It's time to do something.
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