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Sun­day was an inter­est­ing day for me.  I spoke to a friend of mine that lives about 20 min­utes out­side of Allen­town, PA.  He went to the gro­cery store as he always does on Sun­day morn­ings.  He is a man of rou­tine.  He picked up hes hand bas­ket and pro­ceed­ed to fill it with the items that he would nor­mal­ly fill his bas­ket with.  As I men­tioned, he is a man of rou­tine.  he got to the check­out counter to find that his items were almost $20.00 more expen­sive this week than the pre­vi­ous week.  As I ques­tioned him, he men­tioned that he bought the same quan­ti­ties and the same brands as he always buys with no devi­a­tion from his week­ly shop­ping rou­tine.  This friend of mine is on a bud­get as well.  His income has dropped due to the econ­o­my, and is liv­ing pay­check to pay­check.  He is glad he has a job, but is only ever a pay­check or two away from not being able to make it.  We chat­ted a lit­tle more and he felt the need to vent  a bit more as well.  I let him.  Peo­ple need to vent, how­ev­er, the con­ver­sa­tion turned to, “where else can I cut my bud­get, Ive already cut 95% of any waste­ful spend­ing out.”  I can attest that he has… Food pric­ing is going to con­tin­ue to rise as will cloth­ing, etc. very soon.

The sec­ond con­ver­sa­tion I had was at din­ner this evening in NYC with friends I have not seen in about three or four months.  They live in West­ern NJ, and have a decent size piece of prop­er­ty out there. They are putting in a gar­den this year, because not unlike my friend above, these friends had a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion recent­ly at their local gro­cery store as well.  They began ques­tion­ing a cou­ple of oth­er local busi­ness­es that have start­ed rais­ing their prices as well.  The response was inter­est­ing.  He stat­ed that he got sim­i­lar answers from every­one he spoke with.  The answer was that the pro­pri­etors had not increased their prices over the past cou­ple of years in fear of los­ing their cus­tomers, but now their whole­sale costs have gone up so much, they must raise their prices or they may be forced to close their doors because their prof­it mar­gins have become too thin by eat­ing the costs of doing busi­ness.  Inter­est­ing.  They fol­lowed this con­ver­sa­tion up by also stat­ing they are putting in a rather large gar­den this year, and that they are look­ing into dehy­drat­ing as well as can­ning veg­eta­bles from the gar­den.  To give you some his­to­ry, the hus­band used to half jok­ing­ly mock me for dis­cussing any type of prepara­to­ry actions in the past.  He is not a hunter, but is now con­sid­er­ing doing things to pre­serve his cash vs. going to the store and spend­ing to eat.  He con­tin­ued the con­ver­sa­tion with his fear that real infla­tion is com­ing due to politi­cians spend­ing and not tak­ing time to work on any real issues.   We dis­cussed some of those in more detail, but I will not get into them here.

The point here is that out of the blue, I had two friends in a 24 hour peri­od that do not know I write this blog, do not know I have prepa­ra­tions of my own, do not know I am prepar­ing for a nat­ur­al or man made dis­as­ter con­fide in me that they are con­cerned and are think­ing of tak­ing action where they need to for self preser­va­tion.  They are in their infan­cy on their jour­ney’s.  It will be inter­est­ing to see if they take their jour­ney’s seri­ous­ly or if it is rhetoric.

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