$35.95

I bought a dozen bagels and eight ounces of whipped cream cheese at a bagel store in Beverly Hills earlier this morning. It was a jarring experience, as the cash register indicated I had just spent $35.95. At that amount, there was no way I was adding a tip to my purchase. Sorry.

I knew it would be expensive when I walked in, but I swear that the price had gone up by 10% since I last bought a dozen bagels and cream cheese at the same place about three months ago. Shocking.

Generally, I delude myself into believing I am reasonably insulated from the ravages of inflation. I sometimes shake my head at the cost of UberEats or DoorDash when I get food delivered, but our dinners vary, both in restaurant selection and item selection, so I do not really notice individual price changes.

I do not drive much, so I rarely buy gas and do not notice the prices.

I go to the market every week, but I generally spend the same amount. Of course, that may have more to do with what I buy or if the manufacturers’ reduced the amount of food in the packaging than it does to the absence of a change in prices.

My solar panels cover my electricity costs, even when we charge Pam’s car at home, so I do not notice utility rate changes, though I did almost lose my mind over the amount of my gas bill in January, but that was pretty much a one-time event.

So most of my purchases are random enough that I do not notice price changes. But every now and then, like when I buy racks of ribs or briskets or pretty much anything at Bristol Farms, I do, and the price increases hit home. Hard.

As I have written about before, I like to live my life in a rut. I like consistency and routine. I do the same things on the same day of each week. Week in. Week out. I do not vary my routine often. I also do not buy bagels often, and I only bought them this morning because Kimberly asked for them.

One of my Sunday morning activities is to go to the market. I have been going to the same market for the 35 years Pam and I have been living back in Beverly Hills. It is the same market that I went to with my mom during the 1960s and early 1970s. Yup. Week in. Week out. Rut-like in the extreme.

If I go to get bagels, I get them after I leave the market. The store is right up the street. Close by but it causes me to turn left instead of right when I leave the market. As with the market, I have been going to the same bagel place for years. It was owned by Larry King while he was alive. Now it is owned by someone else. The ownership change did not affect the bagels and cream cheese sold there. They are still the same. They have never been inexpensive, but the current prices are ridiculous.

One of my weekly Saturday morning activities is to download all our checking account and credit card transactions into Quicken. I have been doing this for years. Needless to say, I have captured a lot of transactions arising from the purchase of bagels. After I got home and before I cut a bagel and slathered the whipped cream cheese on it, I got curious and decided to look back at how much bagels used to cost.

I opened Quicken on my computer, searched for the transactions on my AmEx card that were for buying bagels in Beverly Hills. It was a good thing that I had not started eating when I looked, as I noted that at the onset of Covid I was paying a paltry $21.06 for the same dozen bagels and container of cream cheese, after adjusting for the tip, which I was still giving then. If I had been chewing on a bagel as I read, I would have gagged when I realized the price had increased almost $15. Whoa.

At that point I reached for my trusty HP12C calculator. I have been using HP calculators since business school, some 44 years ago. I love the reverse Polish notation required to use them, which eliminates the need for entering parenthesis, making them more efficient. It also makes them somewhat immune to theft in much the same way a manual transmission makes a car harder to smash and grab.

In any event, I powered up my 12C, punched in a few numbers, sans parenthesis of course, and quickly determined that bagel and cream cheese prices have gone up over 70% in three and a half years, or about 20% per year. Damn.

I can only imagine how high interest rates would go if the Fed used the bagel and cream cheese price index to calculate the inflation rate. Ouch.

With that thought, I decided it was time to stop chewing over the cost of bagels in my mind. It was way past time to put one in my mouth and chew on it for real. Thankfully, I had not lost my appetite.