You Call It “Inflation,” I Call It a “Dying Planet”
Why the Price of Everything Is Going Crazy — And There May Be No Going Back
The other day, my little local coffee shop was the site of a heist. Think Ocean’s 2022. Only the victim? Me. Do you remember the scene where the little Chinese guy hang upside down from the ceiling and performs Shaolin acrobatics to filch the stuff straight out of the vault? $6 for a coffee. $8 for a goddamned croissant! $15 for a sandwich. What is this stuff made of, plutonium? Hey, little Chinese guy — get the hell out of my wallet!!
We bought a light lunch for 2. And left $50 poorer. It wasn’t exactly steak frites, with a caviar appetizer, followed by a sinfully indulgent gold-dusted chocolate explosion cake. It was just coffee and sandwiches. Wait, no, actually, it was a heist. I felt the way Bernie Madoff’s “investors” must have.
Good Lord. Have you been out there these days? It’s terrifying. The prices, I mean. It’s like the world’s richest man — a psychotic Jeff Bezos — is on a golden scooter, with a gigantic red marker, and marking up everything willy nilly to the point of insanity, stopping for a split second, laughing maniacally, and then revving off to mark up something else.
It is crazy. Looking at my bank account hurts, because this is the worst. Big expenses you can kind of handle, psychologically, you get an idea of the magnitude — but this? Five bucks here, ten there, everything explosively surging upwards? It’s being nickel and dimed to death by a thousand cuts. Even a self-absorbed bastard like me has done something peculiar. Cut back. I’m like hey Umair, maybe you don’t need fourteen cups of coffee you barely drink…when they’re like $87 dollars a day. Maybe, I don’t know, don’t just throw all that money away.
What is even going on here? How did stuff get this eye-wateringly expensive? And is it going to end?
This is the reality of an age of inflation. It’s weirdly nightmarish. You can’t do anything about it. You have two choices: cut back, or suck it up, and pay. And the price rises are totally, completely out of control. I used the example of my little coffee shop — but in truth, it’s everything. Grocery shopping? It’s insane! It’s like offering a crook an open…
