My wife and I got into it last night about the grocery bill.
I pulled up an old Target order from February 2020.
28 items. $64.50.
Added every single one back to the cart just to see.
$158.30.
Same 28 items. Same store. Same cart.
$93.80 more.
In five years.
We didn’t buy more.
Didn’t upgrade anything.
Didn’t add a single extra item.
Just needed the same things we always needed.
They told us inflation was transitory. They told us it was under control. They told us the economy was strong.
Our cart didn’t get any of those memos.
145% increase in five years.
Not one member of Congress has looked at a grocery receipt in decades.
And it shows.
Just here recycling toilet paper roll cores, using my own bags, not running the water when I brush my teeth, while billionaires are blowing up rockets and building water-polluting data centers. It’s hard not to be discouraged.
Shrinkflation pisses me off so bad because not only are you ripping me off but you're gaslighting me. I go talking about how there's less crackers in each sleeve and people treat me like I'm crazy. What's actually crazy is what we're putting up with from these corpos.
Women are out here sharing live locations, checking the backseats of cars, and holding their hands over their drinks. Men are doing 3 hour podcasts about how unfair it is that we don't smile at them. The disconnect is fatal.
I am fully convinced 2019 was the last normal year we ever had. Ever since then, it feels like the simulation broke. Everyone is constantly anxious, time moves both way too fast and barely at all, and nothing actually feels real anymore. The world as we knew it is just gone, and we are all just pretending it’s fine.
Millennials watched their parents lose everything in 2008. Then got handed $100K in student debt. Then got called entitled for wanting a living wage. Then survived a pandemic in our prime years. Then got priced out of every neighborhood we grew up in. And y’all really wonder why we’re not okay? We’ve been in survival mode for 20 years straight and nobody even noticed.
🚨 let me explain what just happened..
TSA workers .. the people who screen your luggage at airports.. stopped getting paid because Congress couldn't pass funding..
today Trump signed an executive order to fix it.. problem solved.. hero moment..
except..
Congress didn't go rogue.. his party controls it.. the funding stalled because of chaos in his own house.. TSA workers went without pay because of a problem he had the power to prevent..
and he had the power to sign this executive order the entire time..
in 2019, Trump's government shutdown lasted 35 days.. TSA workers called in sick in record numbers.. airports descended into a state of utter confusion.. security lines collapsed.. he eventually ended it the same way.. an executive order..
same playbook.. different year..
create the emergency.. let people suffer through it.. sign the paper.. take the credit..
Somewhere a TSA agent is paying their overdue rent with a paycheck that should have never stopped.