Going Up!

Some of you may remember a time before automatic elevators, when the uniformed operator manually opened and closed the elevator doors, asked you to step to the rear, and used a rotating lever to control upward and downward motion, usually ending in a little up-a-bit-down-a-bit dance to get the car to line up just right with the floor when the doors opened. Well, maybe you don't remember it. Maybe only old curmudgeons like Mike and I do. This is what we tend to call "the good old days," which isn't necessarily what we were calling them while they were going on.

Anyhow, I thought about the expression "going up!" yesterday when the reality of the soaring cost of everything really came home to me: the cost of a Berry Smoothie at Costco has gone up from $1.35 to $1.45.

In the grand economic scheme of things, when the big oil companies are jacking up prices faster than filling station operators can replace the plastic numbers on their price signs, and the airlines are desperately searching for new things to charge you extra for, a ten-cent rise in the cost of a Berry Smoothie may not seem like that much. But it's an indication of how - all of a sudden, it seems - prices of everything have gone through the roof.

The cost of oil is at the bottom of most of it. As many news reports remind us every day, oil is a part, one way or another, of everything we buy, eat, or do. It powers the trucks that deliver goods to stores. It's part of the packaging that encloses the things we buy. It's the basis for much of the fertilizer used in agriculture (not to mention powering the farm machinery). And so on. Every time the price of oil goes up, the price of everything that depends on it goes up, too.

It's nobody's fault, of course, as I grumped about here the other day. The current villain is said to be speculators - the faceless and greedy profiteers, awash in money, who buy up vast quantities of some commodity with the sole purpose of making profits by artificially driving up its price. They're also being blamed for much of the sudden huge rise in the cost of food. But who are the speculators? How do you identify them? They don't hang out big, fancy signs reading "Cheatem & Gougem, Professional Speculators" in front of their glass-and-steel high-rise corporate headquarters. And as far as I can tell, Congress - always anxious to hold more hearings at which to berate witnesses in lieu of taking actions which might piss off some part of the electorate - has never subpoenaed a panel of suits representing the speculation community for a stern grilling...

So where do we go from here? Real people around the world are in trouble because the cost of food and energy is soaring. You can cut back on expenses to save money up to a point, but sooner or later your belt runs out of notches to tighten. So far, Agnes and I have been lucky...we both have good jobs that are about as secure as any jobs are apt to be any more. But not everyone is so fortunate. I'm trying to hedge against the future by seeking additional training and education: I keep looking in the backs of magazines for ads for the Famous Speculator's School, where I can learn from some blow-dried suit the mystical and arcane secrets of making a lot of money by manipulating the cost of things everyone needs. I haven't found that ad yet, but I'm still looking.

And in the meantime, I've decided to cut back on my beloved Berry Smoothies.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo