Eggs are expensive. They’re hardly a good barometer for the economy as a whole, especially now when they’re expensive largely due to scarcity resulting from bird flu running rampant, but it’s difficult not to look at a seven dollar carton of eggs and think about all the little ways that grocery buying has gotten kinda fucked up over the last couple years. These days, unless I’m not buying much or really skimping, it is rare that I make it out of the store without spending about one hundred dollars. I could probably get that down with cheaper products and really hunting bargains, but doing that doesn’t save me all that much money and, as someone who has done that more than a few times in the last half a decade thanks to COVID-19, I’m already buying the cheapest stuff I can without sacrificing flavor or quality. What’s worse is that I’m not even buying stuff in the quantities I was before. I used to buy the economy size of most of my staples since I’d definitely go through that stuff before it went bad. Certain spices, condiments, various shelf-stable food in boxes, rice, etc. All stuff I’d buy in the biggest container I could. Now, though, my grocery bill has gone up noticeably and I can’t even buy the volume per item I used to. I literally can’t find some items in the sizes I used to. If I could, I’d still buy them in that size, increased cost be damned, but a lot of brands in the grocery stores I go to have just stopped selling those larger sizes.

When I’d help my parents buy groceries when I was younger, we always bought things at economy of scale. There were seven of us by then, so we went through stuff pretty quickly. It was a habit I carried into adulthood, as I started buying groceries for myself, and that actually hid some of the first signs of economic change from me, back in the day. Turns out that you don’t notice “shrinkflation” as much if you’re already buying the massive bottles of things and enough time passes between purchases that you don’t notice the item getting smaller or the price creeping upward. Now that I’m unable to buy a bunch of stuff in economy sizes, it has been much more noticeable the few times it happens. Buying stuff more frequently, buying it at a less economical price, and constantly looking for the old form factor of stuff (most, but not all, of the economy sizes of things disappeared around the same time the product got a small and largely insignificant visual change to its branding or label) really makes you conscious of when prices and volumes change. It’d be hard to miss, honestly, when you start paying attention to your grocery shopping this much.

There’s not much I can do about this as a consumer. I’ve swapped to buying things in bulk from different brands where I can, rewarding the companies that continue to sell things in large quantities, but it often feels like I’m fighting against a united front in this cost-saving war rather than a bunch of individuals. I couldn’t help but notice when every brand of instant mashed potatoes stopped selling their biggest boxes at the same time. Or when the instant rice brands stopped selling their largest boxes (though one started selling big boxes again recently, so maybe that was only temporary. You know, just a thing that happened for two years and definitely wasn’t them trying to squeeze the market buy making people buy more boxes of rice at a slightly worse price per pound of rice). Or when the spice mix I usually buy stopped showing up in larger containers (and then how all the other larger containers of spices started disappearing in favor of more shelf-stock of normal-sized containers). Every brand making their larger containers disappear at the same time feels like more of a sign of economic issues that a bottle getting slightly smaller or eggs being super expensive thanks to bird flu…

I wish this were a problem I could solve. I’m quite tired of spending so much money on groceries when it feels like I’m barely buying anything. I’m tired of needing to find replacements for stuff that disappears because it was too large and the company producing it decided they wanted more of a profit margin than they were getting. This is getting old and I want it to stop. I do not know when it will. I do not know if it will. All I know is that it feels like just one more thing stacking up to make modern life (and modern society) feel like it’s slowly starting to break down. Not, you know, alone, of course. Being unable to buy garlic salt in a large container isn’t a sign of the collapse of civilization or anything like that. But it definitely contributes to the feeling that the world as I knew it is slowly slipping away from me in a way I’m not comfortable with and also can do nothing about. Much like everything else going on these days. I’m just focused on this specific part of it because of the rice thing, to be honest. Really kinda brought it all to mind.