I was pricing pickled pigs feet on the Internet, when the telephone rang.
I picked it up and received a breathless offer of free hotel accommodations at Martha's Vineyard if I was one of the lucky early callers.
I hung up. I couldn't afford the price of gasoline to reach Martha's Vineyard, even if it was a freebie.
I had begun my research on pickled pigs feet pricing after reading that the Consumer Price Index had surged 1.1 percent in June because, as a small boy, I had once considered them to be a rare luxury.
I doubt that bean counters consider such things. They have a complex system to document what ordinary citizens learn about six months earlier. It's not without value, however, because if things get bad enough it finally gets the movers and shakers to start bailing the boat. This most recent report tells us that inflation was only .06 percent in May, but that was part of the 5 percent it has gone up in the past year. Not good...maybe, and unless.....
Please accept that as statistical data that has little to do with what you are told by the checkout clerk when she hands you your bill for your shopping cart full of groceries, because we should wish prices have gone up by only 5 percent.
The money changers are interested in the shifting of the tectonic plates of the economy. We ordinarily mortals are interested in the price of milk and orange juice and everything else that has us running on empty.
Any one of us could tell the movers and shakers looking at the big picture that they've been slow on the uptake.
Personal stats:
It's just under five miles from here to where I shop, but then I have to return home. That's 10 miles. But it's not about miles, it's about gallons, as in gasoline. My quite small car consumes a gallon every 26 miles around town. Do the math, add that to my shopping basket expenses, and I begin to appreciate how difficult it is for stats like those of the Consumer Price Index to mean anything real to most of us.
The nation's big thinkers need such data. We don't. The big thinkers tinker with the economy from the top down. We live with it from the bottom up, which is why I was trying to find what pickled pigs feet cost in my Google search.
Why have I focussed on pickled pigs feet? A very long time ago, a pickled pig's foot was something I longed for by way of a treat. Chilled in the ice box, all that salt and vinegar and fatty gristle on a hot day — lip-smacking good as a treat because it was something we could live without at a time when just about everyone we knew was bailing their boats.
It wasn't that it was expensive - it was unnecessary. It was something else we did not need at a time when my mother and dad were doing what just about everyone's mom and dad were doing to pay the rent and keep the family fed.
Luxury is being able to afford whatever it is we want to have. Back then, the limit was set by cash in hand and bills to pay. Now, it's how close we are to maxing out credit cards, and the last I heard, combined credit card debt in America was nuzzling close to a trillion dollars.
I have no idea how much a trillion dollars is, but it won't buy as many pickled pigs feet as it could have back in the 1930s. I went to the supermarket. All that delicious fat. All that lip-smacking pickling. All those soaring blood pressure numbers. I didn't buy a jar. Dr. Dan will be pleased.
Bill Plante of Newbury is a staff columnist.
