-by Frank Macdonald
Undoubtedly the word “affordability” will be a contender when the Oxford English Dictionary chooses its word of the year, as it does annually.
It is a word politicians in opposition like to use while auditioning to become the next government. It is a word that makes governing politicians squirmish because their very own spouses use the word every time they come back from the grocery store or a fill-up at the gas station.
Affordability is a word most of us have rarely ever used in our general conversations…until recently. Now it is a four-letter-word in the aisles of grocery stores from here to British Columbia. People who have never spoken to each other before form friendships over the unbelievable prices they show each other, before putting it back on the shelf. A gesture that defines the word affordability.
I did my weekly shopping recently, roaming around the grocery store aisles with a cart carrying so few contents that it looked like I was starving the critter. The thing about those grocery store aisles is that I probably log more steps in there than I would climbing Mount Everest. That’s one benefit to the question of affordability. People take healthier walks while looking for an old-fashioned price. It is a benefit, though, that cancels itself out while you try to decide what to feed your well-exercised body.
Finding a sales price for something that is on your list is a bit of a lottery win, although this week’s sales price bears a strong resemblance to last week’s regular price. But, according to higher management, it is inflation and the fuel cost for trucks delivering bananas from South America that explain away the double-take prices.
Even when the product itself has travelled less that a mile (that’s just over a kilometre for those who speak the current measurement language). Perhaps the grocery business has an algorithm that sends a head of lettuce around the world five times before finally finding the mile-away store whose shelves it was meant to grace. Whatever else is the cause, the major cause of un-affordability is a grocery chain’s gluttony for profits.
When I shop, I am not trying to keep corporate profits from the its rightful heirs. It’s just that I believe I and other shoppers are among those rightful heirs. What appears to be arbitrary pricing is one that pick-pockets my share and sends it off to somebody working on Bay Street, a person who needs every quarter he can get to sustain his rush to become a billionaire.
But let’s set the greed aside and explore the store some more.
I found on a sales shelf a bag of chips. It’s price didn’t frighten me. And they were sprinkled with sea salt. I strongly suspect that sea salt is no better for my pressure than the stuff dug out of the ground, but that’s a question for another day.
What caught my attention was that the information on the chips’ packaging assured me that the chips were “Made from 7 Veggies.”
I have encountered hamburgers and sausages and wieners that are plant-based. I tried them. Truthfully, the only purpose of hamburgers and sausages and wieners is to be a delivery system so we can get mustard, ketchup, relish, onions and other condiments into our mouths in a single bite. People rarely taste the meat itself, which is probably a good thing. I found that plant-based pseudo-meat serves the same purpose. Personally, I prefer the may-contain element of wieners to any imitation, however well meaning and healthy.
What staggered me about these affordability chips was that they were made up of seven…that is 7…other veggies. I’m used to my chips being made up of one vegetable. So what happened? Did the potato get kicked out of the Vegetable Union?
The chips I now have on my table have been composed from seven other vegetables. I opened the compost pot I keep under the sink.
I have been adding to it after most meals, unless a meal was wholly meat-based.
My compost pot hungers for vegetables and fruit only, which I eventually take out to the compost silo. So I looked into the pot. There are the remnants of at least seven, maybe even a dozen, fruits and vegetables in that pot. Enough, I suppose to make my own potato-free chips if I knew the process.
The question, I guess, is what is the state of the potato in today’s marketplace?
Did they fail a vegetable DNA test? Or did they fail the affordability test? I checked and the price of a 5-pound bag of potatoes definitely qualifies as an affordability contender.
So here we are on Thursday evening, flyer day, with the store’s flyer in hand, glancing at its pages full of colourful food, trying not to dwell on prices beneath. Prices that you would expect to spend on a new iPhone has no place underneath the baloney. And the price of steak! Whew! You could buy a couple of bags of potatoes for that much money.
So you’re up and down the aisles more times than an indecisive bride, nodding to the same familiar faces you saw in the previous aisle, same people pushing the same empty carts.
But the reality is that grocery shopping is a popular social activity. Especially if you don’t need to buy anything.