wal-mart wheat

WAL-MART WHEAT
I know that most of you came into work today, a mixture of worry and anticipation clouding your Zen like state of corporate concentration, wondering how my weekend went. While, don’t worry about that just yet. You need to concentrate more on your job. You won’t have it too much longer, but you need to do all you can to keep it until they lock the doors. We are all capable of increased work performance because, let’s face the facts, our jobs are meaningless make-work of absolutely no redeeming value. Even if they used to be mostly about helping other people ( why you got into it in the first place ), the position/job/company/industry has been co-opted by the money people and corrupted. So, we do just enough to get by. My ratio has always been “10% better than the least of the idiots that did this prior to my arrival”. I’ve always been popular due to my productivity combined with low pay requirements. But even I’ve been able to increase my output. You can never have enough Brownie Points built up, because they attitude which used to be “we can replace you with a button” has now been replaced with “we can replace you with someone cheaper”. So, on behalf of all bankers and CEO’s out there that are under increasing pressure to pay off the swimming pool at the vacation home or buy another semester at an Ivy League school ( they have to keep the wife happy-imagine what their alimony payments would look like ), please work harder and work faster.
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My weekend started out pretty normal. Cloudy and cold. It never seems to fail that all winter long my days off are usually miserable. But, no worries. Free coffee awaits at the Laundromat. Then, after we got home I got food poisoning and the day turned to hell. I don’t think I’ve been as sick since self induced alcohol poisoning decades ago. But, all of that is a mere footnote. A mere triviality. Because what did I see in Wal-Mart? A new preparedness section! Wal-Mart wheat is here!!! Wal-Mart wheat is here!!! Wal-Mart, which has gone to great lengths to hack me off over the last six months or so with cost increases, has partially redeemed itself by selling buckets of wheat. Oh, I’ve never stopped shopping there. Some items such as dry beans and vitamin C are no where near as cheap anywhere else. What made me so darn mad is that they were no longer the one stop shopping experience I had come to expect. I can buy eighty eight cent generic Saltines at Smiths, where Wal-Mart is $1.19. They are no longer the low price leader. They are in fact the Screw Jim Leader ( well, third place after the government and wife #2 ). Now I have to shop at nearly a half dozen places to keep all of my food prices low.
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Let’s do the math. A super pail of wheat is $21. 45 pounds in a six gallon bucket. Fifty pounds of wheat at the feed store in my area is $15, and I doubt if I could find the bucket that cheap. Wal-Mart paint buckets are $6 for the five gallon size with lid. So it is actually cheaper to buy the wheat at Wal-Mart than put it together myself. Okay, there is no Mylar bag inside. But I’m sure the thing was put together under controlled conditions. I can’t see it being infested. And the wheat will be much cleaner than the feed store wheat, even if that is only a cosmetic concern. Now, let’s say I found used buckets for a buck and bought a new lid for it. Thirty cents a pound for the wheat, three buckets per hundred pounds ( assuming you found five gallon rather than six ). So thirty six cents a pound, or $16.20 for the same amount as the Wal-Mart pail. Now it is no longer a great deal. But if you can’t find used buckets, or there is not a feed store in a reasonable driving distance, then going with the Wally World wheat is a blessing. Certainly it is cheaper than buying through the mail. If you are comparing the cost of buying at, say, Walton, keep in mind the above cost. 36 cents a pound with used buckets and feed store wheat. 47 cents a pound at Wal-Mart.
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While I am happy, and I did buy a bucket even though it played havoc with my dollar store budget ( which is okay, last week I got three large tubes of generic Shoe Goo for a buck each so skipping this week was tolerable ), it is still a shame considering the same wheat ten years ago. One third the price. Feed store wheat was $5 a sack ( and that was at the only one around for fifty miles and certainly overpriced ). And buckets were going begging for a buyer, there was so much slop going out of so many food joints. Of course, oil was a lot cheaper then, too. Wheat prices have consistently gone up the last ten years. As has everything else. Do not wait. Buy yours now. It will only get more expensive. And the same, more than likely, with ammunition. I think it has been long enough that we can’t just blame politics or production bottlenecks. At the price it is now commanding, any capacity lying idle should have already gone into increasing the supply. I think it is a permanent supply problem of its components. Or, just keep thinking happy thoughts and put off buying your preps. Let’s see how far that gets you.
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