Food: "stealth downsizing" is nothing new

Food Inflation Kept Hidden in Tinier Bags

This has been going on for years. Probably forever. Ever wonder why cans and packages of food come in such oddball sizes? When the product was new, it came in a nice, even size, but over the years, companies need to increase profits, and they know people watch prices. It's especially easy to watch prices considering the irritating way so much merchandise is priced, i.e. $3.99, $2.95, $1.99---in any of these cases, a very slight increase will be very noticeable because it will carry over all the way to the whole dollar amount. Instead, they'll sneak in a one ounce reduction in the size of the package, but keep the price the same. And so, eventually that bag of potato chips that used to be an even "one pound" size, ends up weighing 14 ounces, then 12.5; or that can of tomato sauce that used to be exactly one quart (32 fl. oz.) is now 29.5 fl. oz. And so on.

The difference today must be that more companies are doing it, in larger and more obvious increments. The example of the saltines in the article is particularly egregious, and therefore obvious. I've noticed that my toilet paper rolls are narrower than they used to be. This one was easy to spot because they don't fit in the dispenser the way older rolls used to fit. I buy a good deal of food sold by weight, and I watch prices like a hawk. I recently noticed that the chicken I usually buy now costs exactly double per pound compared to what I was paying for it a year ago.

[Of course, we're not supposed to care about any of this. We're just supposed to charge it all on our credit cards and keep our attention on some stupid revolution in Libya, or on sensationalistic, fact-sparse nuclear disaster reports from Japan, or on abortion, or gay marriage, or "crime", or some 13 year old girl who made a fucking video that people apparently hate, or on some bullshit healthcare plan that doesn't do anything substantive, or (most of all) on terrorisim (OMG!) and (gasp) PREDATORS! :-O Never on something mundane and tedious like whether we're going to have enough money to buy food six months from now. Frankly, the media these days is in such a reality-impaired rabbit hole it almost makes that guy in Dr. Strangelove sound rational when he rants about the corruption of our precious bodily fluids.]

A Gold standard would not be a cure-all

Some interesting comments on the idea of reverting the US to a gold standard instead of fiat currency:

Another Case Of Severe Recto-Cranial Inversion

The title is a bit inflammatory, I admit. :) Basically, though, the article makes sense. To summarize, proponents of the gold standard posit that it would alleviate inflation due to replacing fictitious fiat money with "real" money, i.e. gold. Inflation would supposedly be alleviated due to the naturally limited supply of gold.

The linked article uses history to prove that this is not what would necessarily happen. Part of the problem is that the supply of gold and the value of gold are two different things. In other words, it is incorrect to assume that something, anything, has some inherent and stable value, when the reality is that virtually nothing does. (Even food and water, which clearly have inherent value, do not have inherent stable value. They also wouldn't be very useful as currencies.) The other part of the problem relates to who controls the supply of gold. Cartels tend to form, and cartels inevitably function for their own benefit, not the general good. They can, and will, manipulate the supply for their own profit.

Consequently, when when gold has been used as a currency in the past, inflation and deflation ran rampant in wildly erratic variation, causing a lot of suffering for a great number of people.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that a gold standard would be a bad idea, it just means that people aren't being realistic about it. It would certainly not be a magical cure-all for our economic woes, most of which are simply the result of human corruption, greed and stupidity.

The article goes on to address what the author believes to be the real problem, namely inadvisable lending. He's probably right.

You Want Small Business to Start Hiring? Here's What To Do

I like the way this guy thinks. Sign me up.