Disguising Price Increases(No Politics Please)

[MissS]

I stopped by Tractor Supply yesterday for something and saw their Bonnie Plants display outside. Of course, I had to see what was there and it was quite a shock. 4-packs of cabbage plants for $5.99! I had to look twice to make sure it was only four plants and not six. Boy, am I RICH with all the homegrown packs of veg I have going!

I think that this is going to be a great year for starting and producing your own food. The farmers are in for a very hard time this year. There are expected water shortages and issues with harvesting the crops and temperatures are expected to be hot again.

[worth1]

We can expect more price increases soon.
I posted on the controversial thread.

[worth1]

A 60 count box of eggs is 10 dollars cheaper at Walmart than HEB.
A 12 count large eggs is almost half as much as HEB.
This is ridiculous HEB seems to have a monopoly on food in this area.
I guess they want to pay for all the new ones going up.
And the remodeling.

[worth1]

Back to onions.
What onion I don't eat I have a place for it in the refrigerator.
If it dries out I just chop it up and put it in soup or cook with it.
It's the door shelf with the cover.

[bower]

One good news for farmers, maybe? At least according to this news piece, suppliers stocked up on potash before the tarriffs went on. If you can imagine a major fertilizer going up suddenly 25% that's a hard knock for farmers if it did. So at the least, it looks like there is no imminent harm to the farm.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and- ... goes-ahead
Still I agree with @MissS we are all going to be extra glad of anything we grew ourselves to eat this year.
The price of seedlings certainly is nuts!
I'm thinking on your onion strategy @karstopography and I could probably pull that off with some onion sets... must do it. It's so much better to have your own. I already bought seed potatoes so, in for a penny as they say...

[MissS]

@bower the biggest problem as I see it is the lack of people to harvest crops this year along with a water shortage in California.

[worth1]

@bower the biggest problem as I see it is the lack of people to harvest crops this year along with a water shortage in California.

Speaking of farm labor I just talked to a young guy that was flabbergasted that I used to work the farms.
He told me that he worked the farms in Northern California.
He's 30 years old and lives in Texas now.
Yes he's Hispanic.
Farm harvest work is one of the most unappreciated under paid jobs there is world wide.
Our country as many others are in a terrible imbalance when it comes to wages and work done.
One way or the other the prices will rise either by paying fare pay or costing more due to supply and demand.
In this day and age one person working their tail off from daylight till dark easily 12 hours a day and bringing home 20 to 30 k a year is ridiculous.
That's why whole families live and work together.
But they have to follow the crops to keep this steady wage coming in.
They don't get paid by the hour they get paid by how much they can pick.
I can't count how many conversations I've had with these folks and working in the fields picking crops.
Nobody wants to do it anymore.
Some times they live on the property and have the so called rent taken out of their pay.

It happened to me when I was 16 years old working all summer hauling hay.
I felt robbed.
I lived in a tent that summer and got charged for it.

[pepperhead212]

And tiny seeds (along with the other brassicas), so they are very cheap! Of course, that's another ripoff, when you see those kind of seeds sold @ something like 25/$4.99, when I get them from some places @500/$1.99.

[bower]

TBH regardless of the causes of food insecurity, I thiink the obvious answer or part of it is for food to be grown everywhere, as much as you can. Less reliance on those huge enterprises is a safety net if you can do it.
Meanwhile the big farms have made it easy for everyone to eat, I won't deny that mass production brings prices down and all that. But as GoDawgs pointed out, when you're doing it from scratch your price is your time.
Likewise for the seed, so costly if you are buying by the pack, nothing wrong with supporting those enterprises that conserve some seed diversity but also no shame at all in growing your own seed for whatever you want to grow. Fresher seed, better seed.
I went a decade of hard times when I grew seed and swapped seed and never bought one packet, and I ended up growing all kinds of vegetables I never even dreamed of. What a great experience, and as for the food - no words. So good.

[GoDawgs]

Cost also varies a lot depending on where you get your seed. There are vendors in the high price range and those more affordable. Then there's seed available at the big boxes (HD, Lowes, etc) where the choices aren't as wide but there's no shipping fee. Further down the price line are the feed and seed stores. Yes, the selection is even more narrow but costs a lot less.

At my feed and seed I got 12 Yukon Gold seed potatoes this year for $1.27 and I was able to pick the ones I wanted out of the big sack of them. For .65 I can get enough National Pickler cuke seed to plant half the county! Danvers carrots, Silver Queen corn, plain old yellow straightneck squash, purple top turnip and mustard all come from my local feed 'n weed. Of course I order a lot of other stuff too, hit the Ferry-Morse displays here and there if needed and save what seed I can.

[GoDawgs]

Eggs. We were in the city today for an Aldi and Sam's run. Sam's had 24-count boxes of "cage-free" eggs for $9.37 (4.68/dz), limit two per customer (which we got) so we're good for a while. Those were the only kind of eggs they had today. Aldi's one dozen boxes were about $5.85 each and Walmart's online site said theirs was 5.97 for the one dozen box, 8.82 for the 18-count box.

Gas. Since gas in the city is about 20 cents less per gallon that out in the sticks where I am, I filled up today for $2.56/gal. The price has been going down over the past two weeks.

[worth1]

Eggs at HEB have dropped down to 4.35 on line.
Should be a little less at the store.
60 count is 20 dollars.
I'm keeping an eye on prices and if they start to creep up I'll buy more.

[Danny]

Eggs are $3.98 a dozen, large, at our local walmart and in good supply. Oddly, spring or green onions are like a dollar a bunch !

[karstopography]

Aldi earlier this week had cage free large brown eggs for $3.38/dozen. I bought a dozen. Use by dates were fine, weeks out. Their commodity eggs were $3.98/dozen. The Cage Free brown eggs were way down near the floor in the egg refrigerator.

These stores around here are running specials on produce. Good varieties of Apples for 79 cents per pound. Baby Bella mushrooms for $1.29/8 ounces. Three pounds of Cara Cara oranges for $2.89.

I don’t feel like anything is getting any less expensive other than the specials to get people in the door.

I’m not loyal to any particular store. My loyalty is to my wallet.

[worth1]

I'm not loyal to HEB but my only other option is Walmart and that ain't gonna happen.
Every time I've been in that place I feel like I've been violated somehow.
I can't count how many times I've been mistakenly accused of shoplifting.
You walk out the door and someone's there to give you the once over to make sure you're not stealing something.

[bower]

I was in Walmart last week, lured by the online claim that they had tool handles in stock and also a digging fork for about $17 - less than the cost of a handle at about $20. Sadly it was all lies! None of the things I needed "in stock" were anywhere to be found.

Lo behold though, they had seed potatoes from the same company that's being sold in other stores, only 3 dollars cheaper per kilo at $6.97 CAD. So I succombed to that and got two more kinds of seed potatoes. Sangre and Norland, for a direct comparison with the other reds.

The cost of garden tools is all over the map. If you look at what's listed online, there are basic tools selling for over $100 if anyone is crazy enough to pay it. You can still get a basic shovel or a basic rake for under $20, but everything else is sky high. $45 for a digging fork, $60 or more for a light pick, and so on.
Meanwhile the selection of replacement handles is inadequate. You will literally have to make your own handle from scratch, for anything other than the basic shovel or rake.

[karstopography]

My primary garden shovel has a fiberglass handle. All my garden tools, the hoe, both shovels, the garden fork have either metal or fiberglass handles. Wood for garden tool handles is a joke here. Breaks the first week. Between the tree roots and heavy soil, wood handled gardening tools are useless. The rake has a wood handle.

Walmart. Ours, the parking lot is bedlam. That’s enough to discourage me from going there.

[worth1]

That's because it's almost impossible to get a wood handle that's made correctly or from the right wood.
Most of not all of the wooden handles are trash these days.
They simply don't know or care.
Fiberglass wasn't around forever and they selected the right wood cut the right way.
It took me forever to find the right handle for my grape hoe.
If you've ever used a wood baseball bat the trademark goes up or down for the same reason.
@karstopography

hammer_handles.png.d9ac76a83a151200f088da9c7d579604.png

[GoDawgs]

I'm not loyal to HEB but my only other option is Walmart and that ain't gonna happen.
Every time I've been in that place I feel like I've been violated somehow.
I can't count how many times I've been mistakenly accused of shoplifting.
You walk out the door and someone's there to give you the once over to make sure you're not stealing something.

That's because there IS a lot of shoplifting. They have a checker at the doors at my Walmart too; same lady every time I go. She's basically checking to see if any wine or beer in the cart is on the receipt. So now I have the cashier ring up any of that first so the checker lady can see it right off without having to go down the whole receipt.

[worth1]

I'm not loyal to HEB but my only other option is Walmart and that ain't gonna happen.
Every time I've been in that place I feel like I've been violated somehow.
I can't count how many times I've been mistakenly accused of shoplifting.
You walk out the door and someone's there to give you the once over to make sure you're not stealing something.

That's because there IS a lot of shoplifting. They have a checker at the doors at my Walmart too; same lady every time I go. She's basically checking to see if any wine or beer in the cart is on the receipt. So now I have the cashier ring up any of that first so the checker lady can see it right off without having to go down the whole receipt.

Well if they're going to steal in the store they'll break into your car and steal.
I got my ice chest stolen out of my pickup at a Walmart.