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So, if I want to buy a 100 Grand candy bar (or an Almond Joy, or a Heath Bar, or whatever), and I go to the candy aisle in the local gas station, or the one in the IGA, the candy bar will cost about two bucks, give or take. But! If I go to the local dollar store to buy the same brand of candy, packaged as four to six “fun sized” individually wrapped bars, each of these packages are $1.25, or $5 if I buy five. The aggregate amount of candy by weight is pretty much the same as if I bought the full-sized candy bar, but because they are packaged differently, it costs half as much. Does this make sense? No! It does not! I mean yes, I understand that one is positioned as an impulse buy and one is not, I do understand the psychology of the supermarket. I get it, truly I do. But it still boggles my mind.
Likewise if I go to the store to buy a 12-pack of Coke Zero, it will be somewhere between $8 and $10, but if Krissy goes to Kroger on a particular day and shows them her Kroger card (or whatever) then she can get the “buy two, get three free” discount, which again means the actual cost of the 12-pack is 40% of what its usual cost is. It works similarly for lots of other things, including things that are not junk food or drink.
“Congratulations, Scalzi, you’ve discovered coupons,” I hear you say. Look, I’m not saying any of this is new. But it does seem to me the variance in pricing is more significant now than it was before. I’m not exactly what you would call a price-sensitive individual these days, but I still finally broke down and got myself a CVS card because the difference in cost between having that card, and not, was high enough that my brain rebelled against needlessly spending that much more.
(Yes, I’m aware that CVS, Kroger, et al are data farming what I purchase. As a practical matter, I don’t really care if CVS learns I’m buying Doritos; they were tracking the UPC when I went to check out anyway. And as a general matter I’m not purchasing anything in a supermarket or pharmacy that I want to hide from data crunching.)
I know this is a bit of an aimless rant, but I think what I’m really getting at is that the answer to the question “why are things so expensive right now” really is “because fuck you, that’s why.” That candy bar quite evidently doesn’t need to be $2; that 12-pack of soda doesn’t need to be $8, and there are a lot of people who can’t afford the clearly arbitrary high prices that things have, who have to pay them anyway. It’s annoying for me, but for someone else it might mean skipping a meal or two, or more, here and there. It doesn’t seem fair, and it doesn’t seem right.
— JS
Unlike the Sugar Gem oranges, this watermelon was sweeter than a regular ol’ watermelon. Not only that, but the label boasts a rich, red flesh. I thought it may have been all talk, but lo and behold it was indeed very red! I bought this one for six dollars, which is pretty much the exact same cost as a regular watermelon, and it’s roughly the same size, so I’d say you should go ahead and buy this one over the regular ones if you are someone who prefers a juicier, sweeter watermelon.
