Back to the Blog

By accident, I came across a blog someone wrote with only four entries, all on the same date in 2009. I started a blog on October 25, 2007 and have 86 entries to date, but none since February 7, 2012. Lest any reader think something happened to me, I thought it was time to blog again. In truth, I never stopped writing, just publishing. Now I will do both. I’ll start with an observation about the shrinking size of products. I remember when a Hershey bar cost five cents. Then, instead of raising the price, they reduced the size of the bar. I don’t know if that was the first instance of shrinkage, but the trend seems to have accelerated in recent years. I bought a box of Kleenex tissues the other day. The price was right – just a dollar. But the number of tissues in the box seemed low – just 100 (no, I did no count them). It occurred to me that every time I used a tissue, whether to blow my nose or squash a bug, it cost me one cent. By the way, I refrain from using the word “penny” because as a numismatist, I know that the penny used to be a coin in England, whereas the coin we commonly refer to as a penny is actually a one cent piece. The government says it costs more than one cent to make one cent, even though they haven’t used copper since 1982. Anyway, this got me to thinking about how much these shrunken items really cost per unit. Four chicken McNuggets for a dollar comes to about 12 ½ cents a bite. A $3.00 slice of pizza is about fifty cents a bite. Rising costs and shrinking products, coupled with the state of the economy, makes one wonder how close we are to making even the dollar bill worth hardly anything. Newspapers have recently gone from 50 cents to a dollar, while at the same time, cutting content. Even the Sunday comics, a staple of my youth, have been cut down to fewer than a dozen. It was easy to purchase a 50 cent newspaper when you received two quarters back. It’s more difficult to say goodbye to a whole dollar bill. They say as you age, you shrink. So I guess I’m right in tune with what’s happening.