The Price is NOT Right
It’s lawn maintenance time here in the north east and I hit the local Home Depot ready to make my lawn green with envy. I pick up a bag of Scotts crab grass killing fertilizer and WHAT THE FUG?!… It was almost SIXTY BUCKS! I ask the dude in the department, “Wasn’t this stuff like $36 last year?!” He said Yep. So I said, I said, “Yeah, Okay, then WHAT THE HELL?”
“The price of oil. It takes a lot of oil to make this stuff.”
Geezuz H. Christmas. Why the hell is the price of oil the blame for all of this high priced insanity? Damn, sixty freakin bucks for a bag of orange pellets. I prayed that one bag was enough to do my lawn. Then I remember I’ve gotta get a spreader. I pick up a dinky little plastic bucket with a handle and faux plastic wheels and it’s thirty bucks! I expected to leave with a bill of around sixty dollars and I dropped a hundred bucks. Bend over and grab ankles, please come again.
Any of you do a little food shopping lately? Every god damned time I go to the A&P, I go in expecting to spend thirty dollars on a few necessities, and when the register chicks says, “That’ll be eighty-three dollars, please,” I soil myself . Last week over the intercom you heard “Clean up at register six” and my kids wanted to bury their heads in the proverbial sand.
I don’t know about you guys, but I can’t stand this crap, anymore. And you know what? I think it might just get a whole hell of a lot worse.
Let me ask you - how long before a jar of jam is a hundred dollars and we’re all eating Soilent Green? Let’s forget the fact that I live in New Jersey and the taxes on my is twenty-five hundred square foot home is $11,000 a year. Okay, let’s not forget that fact. It is truly brutally expensive to live in my state and it sucks a whole lot. But the wife and I are not in a position to get up and leave at this point in our lives so we’ve gotta suck it up and make it work. Plus, in my line of work, being a stone’s throw from the Big Apple is a good thing for me… but have you seen the price of apples, lately?
Do the food manufacturer’s think we’re completely stupid? You see the size of a box of breakfast cereal, these days? They are slim and almost half the size of what they were in the past, yet go for five or six bucks. This is definitely the new trickery they have thrusted upon us. A can of tuna is infinitely smaller than it used to be, frozen dinners that were twelve ounces are now nine ounces, and big bags of chips are a hell of a lot more air than chips.
I’ve made it clear that I’m not a fan of the Walmart shopping experience, but going cheap may be the only way to go. I certainly could do without the 170 year old door greeter whose Depends are filled to the brim with a yesterday’s meatloaf and green beans, but I thnk I can get past the smell if I can save some serious moolah. But I WILL NOT buy my clothes there. Okay, maybe my underwear, but that’s it.
Yeah, our cigars went up in price, but how long before a pack of cigarettes is ten bucks? Of course if people stop smoking them the government will have to find the billions from tax revenue, elsewhere. They’ll tax other goods and services and it will be impossible to live in America. We’ll become a two class system as there will be no more middle, only the filthy rich and the filthy not so even remotely rich. We’ll have the same inflation and brutal tax rates of Canada and England, but they get free health insurance while ours goes higher and higher.
This new president of ours has his hands fuller than the Walmart greeter’s diaper. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - who the hell would want that job? (I’m referring to the president, not the Walmart greeter, but I guess the same can be said.) Only a massively inflated, Hindenburg sized ego could possibly think they could handle the friggin mess we’re in.
Okay, what did I accomplish here? Absolutely nothing except get you guys more pissed off than you already are. But we’ve gotta get pissed. We elect these lying, cheating, scumbag officials into office and these bastards need to be held accountable. These bank presidents and mortgage CEO’s need to be held accountable. Things have been mismanaged WAY too long and now we’re all taking it in the bunghole with a red hot poker from Satan himself!
I’m tired of this shit. No more. You hear me? No more! Stand up, be heard and fight to the death.
But you know what though? My lawn does look pretty good.
Have a swell week and talk amongst yer selves,
Tommy Z.
JR CIGARS Blog With the Zman
