Tuna sale, economic ramblings

Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

Got a chance to stock up on tuna today. The local Albertson’s had the StarKist brand pouches of tuna marked down to a buck each. However, there was also a stack of manufacturers coupons there that were ‘$1.50 off 3’. So that winds up coming out to $0,50 per pouch. Well…at that price wouldn’t you pick up a couple dozen too? (Those coupons expire 9/2009 so a stack of ‘em are coming home with me also.)

It’s weird…finding little scores like that seem like huge triumphs to me these days. Like Im getting away with something or just discovered plutonium by accident. I become immensely pleased with myself. However, as Poor Richard would say, a penny saved is a penny earned. Any money that isn’t being spent on food, fuel or other goods is more money we have to set back against whatever may come.

When I was a kid I never gave a thought to where the food, heat and shelter in my life came from. What kid does? We open the fridge and theres a carton of milk, we turn on the shower and we get hot water, we go to bed and we have clean sheets. We never really grasp, as a kid, that every one of these things came from our mom or dad (or both) getting up every morning and slogging to work. It wasn’t until years later that that lesson dawned on me.

Nowadays, money is right up there with fuel, food and ammo. It’s a ward..a charm..a talisman..a protection… against the uncertain future. The more you have the greater your insulation from dire circumstances. And while there may be times when money won’t do much for a person (like when the store shelves are bare) money is quite easily converted into goods (when those goods are available). So anytime I can get tuna for 1/3 the price…that’s just as good as getting an extra 5 miles per gallon, or hitting three deer with one bullet. Its an economy of resources that means what I have will go further…or that I can keep more resources in reserve.

So..money is our friend. And store club savings, coupons, and manufacturers rebates are our friends also. (As an aside, I’ve encountered people who actually think theres a stigma attached to using coupons. :::shrug::: Theres a greater stigma attached to using food stamps and food banks, honey. Use the one so you won’t have to use the other.)

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

I don’t want to sound like a broken record, nor do I want to sound like an “I told you so”, but for the last several years now I’ve figured that the most likely Very Bad Thing that would happen would be economic. Sure there was a tie for first place with ‘nuclear terrorism’ but for the last several years economic disaster has been my first choice for what the most likely next catastrophic event would come as.

There are, to be sure, plenty of folks out there that say that this isn’t really as bad as every one makes it out to be. That this is a normal cyclical economic change and that it’ll swing back to the ‘good’ side of the meter in short order. Maybe. I probably tend to read the articles saying we’re all going to be eating our pets by Christmas more closely than I read the ones saying ‘sit tight, it’ll be back to normal in six months’.

I know very little about economics. I try to familiarize myself with basic ideas and theories but I am not nearly as conversant in the field as I should be. (I am trying, though.) However, I do know about consequences and results. For me, one of the interesting things about preparedness is how it changes your way of thinking. Preparedness makes you look at the possible outcomes of an action or event and to continue looking past those to the next generation of consequences. Its become second nature for me now.

So…anyone else would see automakers not getting their bailout and then predict that there’ll be higher unemployment. And that’s usually where their thinking slows down or moves on to other things. I see it as higher unemployment…and then an increase in demand for public services, those services being overburdened, taxes going up thereby forcing some businesses to cut back thus increasing the problem, crime rates going up as people with nothing to lose start to take ‘whats due them’, and finally a vocal group of these people getting a political solution that makes things even worse. All the while the economic figures, which may actually not be as bad as they seem at first blush, spook more people into circling their wagons…buying slows down, retailers suffer, more people are out of work, the .gov tries some Third-world tactics to get the economy moving again (stimulus checks, anyone?) The rest of the world follows our economy and things get lean everywhere else…and some of those economies, my friends, are in countries that are already unstable to begin with. And this sort of thing isn’t just on the US automakers…it can come from any market segment getting wiped out. However, that doesn’t mean I think the .gov needs to jump in to start getting into the [auto/financial/mortgage] industry. Let ‘em go broke. Things will be rough for a while but when the dust clears the surviving corporations and industries will be stronger. Natural selection and all that.

Or, quite possibly, Im overreacting and things really are just doing part of the give-take of a normal economic cycle. I hope that’s the case. I hope that people start feeling secure in their future and start spending money like drunken Democrats. I’m in the retail business, after all…my best days are when someone comes in with pockets full of cash and a head full of impulse and spontaneity. I want people to feel that theres no problem spending money because there’ll always be more. Its good for my business. Heck, all the stored food and gear we hold against bad times will keep for a long time so it won’t be like I wasted any money if things suddenly turn into a bustling vibrant recovery. But given the simple binary choice of ‘are things going to get worse or better in the near future’ I want to say that I feel they are going to get worse and not get better for some time. I’d like to be wrong, I really would. I have friends and family who are suffering now and will suffer worse as the economy runs its course. I don’t want to see them suffer and I certainly don’t want them to find themselves in the position of too many people these days – getting foreclosed on, eating .gov cheese and feeling helpless. But I do think that its going to get worse before it gets better. New administration or no….I think things are at a point where there are no ‘good’ solutions and only lesser degree of bad ones.

Nothing you or I can do about it. All we can do is take steps to prepare against it. Writing letters to politicians won’t, I think, make a difference nor will standing around pointing fingers. While the captain and crew are re-arranging the deck chairs I plan on quietly loading my gear into the lifeboat and start paddling away before getting sucked under by the whirlpool.

9 thoughts on “Tuna sale, economic ramblings

  1. Here’s what I don’t get: People who buy shit because it is on sale, and then put it on their fucking credit card.

    And I kinda see buying everything I can on sale as almost being like getting a 15% raise, I mean, if I actually made any money. But you get the idea.

  2. Not your main point …

    > I know very little about economics.

    It is so ironic and surprising you said this, and basically went on to explain *perfectly* the unintended consequences of the “seen and unseen” in the chapter on economic fallacies and public works/government spending in “Economics in One Lesson” By Henry Hazlitt.

    If you are at all interested …

    HTML: http://jim.com/econ/contents.html

    PDF: http://prawo.uni.wroc.pl/~kwasnicki/EkonLit/Economics%20In%20One%20Lesson.pdf

    Audiobook (I’m a permanent seeder for this): http://www.mininova.org/tor/1287763

    Video discussion chapter by chapter:

    Video 1: The Lesson
    Video 2: The Broken Window
    Video 3: Public Works Mean Taxes
    Video 4: Credit Diverts Production
    Video 5: The Curse of Machinery
    Video 6: Disbanding Troops and Bureaucrats
    Video 7: Who’s Protected by Tariffs?
    Video 8: “Parity” Prices
    Video 9: How the Price System Works
    Video 10: Minimum Wage Laws
    Video 11: The Function of Profits
    Video 12: The Assault on Saving
  3. Re: Not your main point …

    Already have it, already read it…and thats just how Hazlitt described economics – seeing the consequences and further consequences of an action.

    Its a very good book and I enjoyed it immensely. I got it about a year ago and still pick it up from time to time to persue random bits.

  4. Re: Not your main point …

    Well that explains it. 🙂

    Still, not to blow your head up so big the wife can’t get you out the door to work in the AM or anything … Hazlitt getting those points into a small book is one of the great achievements of Austrian thought. You getting the crux of it into a couple paragraphs *anyone* can understand is an achievement to be proud of. Even though it will probably never reach the exposure of a billion other pieces of writing out there, it was a good piece of writing bro. Kudos. Bravo. All that crap. 😀

  5. the economy

    is in a real mess period. bailouts only means somebody else will pay more either in taxes or product purchased.

    and there will be more bailouts to come. nice how the government and corparate sectors play the numbers out, but hey it has been a great ponzi scheme soon to wreak even more havok on us poor people about.

    have fun as usual. Wildflower 08

  6. I think the situation is being presented as more dire than it actually is. Bad news sells, and the people delivering the news are selling it, not giving it away.
    But I also realize that there are very real problems, and think it foolish to act as if everything is fine.
    Sunday we were listening to a re-run of Car Talk, where they were recounting the adventures of one of the hosts being stranded by a blizzard in a house with no electricity, heat, or food. Man, did I feel superior. Hell, I’d be better off stranded in my car than he was in his house.

  7. the car talk brothers have degrees from MIT i think. Educated idiots.

    The main economic plunge will occur because the dollar can only be artificially propped up for so long before hyper inflation takes hold. Interesting post from a survival blogger from Argentina that went through such a time and he said the best canned food was….tuna.

    Folks can’t pay their mortgage and buy cars because we outsourced all of our manufacturing, hell we sent Deming to Japan after the war to teach them how to make cars, now they are kicking our ass.

    Since we don’t make anything anymore we will gradually become like Mexico or other second world countries. Dirt farmers with no hope. Dang, now I need a drink.

Comments are closed.