Grocery Priced Have Doubled!

You read the title correctly. Grocery prices have  doubled in the past decade.

 

 

 Perhaps some foods remain relatively inexpensive, but others have doubled or tripled in price. Has your income doubled in the last decade? No. Mine either. In fact my kids all got older and starting eating more, gas to go fetch the food has gone up, and frankly so has everything else.

 

Frankly thinking about this has made me both angry and depressed, as well as a little frightened. The media tries to make us feel better by telling us things like "Jobless claims point to layoffs at lowest level since 2008" (money.cnn.com) and "Why 2013 should be a good year for the U.S. economy" (Washingtonpost.com). But I am not feeling any better. In fact I am feeling a lot worse. Our economy is in shambles. Our government does nothing but dig the whole deeper. We are a country living on credit. We all know that one day it will be time to pay the piper, and when that day comes what happens? Printing more money is not going to save the day, it is just digging us in EVEN DEEPER. Our dollar is barely worth anything anymore, making more money makes it worth less.

 

 And there is the problem.

 

No buying power.

 

Around 2004 I fed a large growing family a whole foods based diet, much of it local, natural, and some organic for about $100-$125 a week. We ate well. Meat, real butter, Cabot cheese, local produce, real maple syrup on our whole wheat pancakes, good milk, yogurt, fruit, etc. My pantry and freezer were always full.

 

Fast forward to the present early 2013. Last week I spent around $200 for groceries. I added up the receipts I could find and the debits from my checking and ATM card and came to 186.00, this did not include a couple trips to the store next to the library where I work for a drink, snacks at the gas station (bad habit), or the fast food my son and I ate when we had to go out to the orthopedist. I might not mind if we were eating amazing gourmet food or very healthy. I would not mind if everything was local and organic. I would not mind if there was something extra in my pantry when the week came to an end. But there isn't and we are not.

 

 So here I am. A mom with three kids, two of them teens. Wife of a man with a metabolism that runs at the speed of light. A family on a varying and modest income. I sit here and wonder how I can keep this up. I wonder what to change. I think about the book I am reading on the Great Depression and worry a bit more. But I also find hope in those pages. Those people had nothing but each other, hope, a strong will and strangely they had happiness. They survived worse than this, although I am not convinced it will not get as bad as that before it is over. I can survive too.

 

This blog is here to hopefully document how I will make this work. How I bring our budget back under control. How I learn to feed everyone when our dollars are worth so little.