stock up!

I'm not sure if you've been reading the newspapers are looking up stuff on the Internet but you'll probably notice that inflation is reported to be roughly 1-2%. I don't know if I believe those numbers entirely. Inflation on goods you don't need is low, but inflation on goods that you do need is higher than reported.

The consumer price index is calculated using a basket of goods, including various things like [don't quote me on this] the cost of hotels, food, housing costs, energy, transportation, and other goods like electronics and computers. I'm sure there's others that I have not mentioned.

In case you haven't noticed, car prices are dropping like crazy as our home prices. In addition, other discretionary expenses are also a dropping in price. That is putting a downdraft on inflation. You may have not noticed or might have noticed, depending on how closely look, that grocery prices are actually not going down very much - in fact, not at all. In fact, last week bananas were actually up approximately 15c a pound and we haven't noticed any significant decreases in the cost of any fresh produces since the summertime. Some people may attribute this to the relative weakness of the Canadian dollar in comparison to the US dollar and this also could be due to the increase in the cost to import goods especially in the wintertime.

So, in order to mitigate that inflation, we went on a little binge last week.

We went on a significant grocery trip last week. We went out and stocked up on dried goods, such as pasta. We didn't just buy small quantities of past, but we ended up buying approximately 36 kg of it (in restaurant-sized boxes). We also ended up buying a significant quantity of flour (we usually buy 20kg bags). We've noticed that buying in bulk significantly allows us to save money and we don't need to spend extra time going out if we run out of goods, because we never really do. Ditto with rice and sugar. We used to get 20kg of rice for around $12-14. Now, it's $33. We ended up buying the cheaper rice, which is still $18-19/20kg.

I digress.

All the flour and the past was purchased at a local wholesaler that does not charge a membership fee. Yesterday, we went out and bought some seeds but that is for a later post. Stay tuned!