Karen Abrams holds an MBA from UC San Francisco. She is a Marketing and Small Business Consultant in the US and Caribbean. Karen is also a partner in a party rental business in Decatur, GA.
Yesterday I made a trip to the supermarket to purchase family rations for dinner and the following day’s breakfast. I usually do my shopping at Publix Supermarket, a major food retailer in the United States. Because of the recently escalating concerns over rising food prices, I decided to pay unusually close attention to my receipts. The first thing that caught my eye was that a 3 quart bottle of Tropicana orange juice which we had gotten into the habit of buying was listed at $6.99, up from the price of $3.99 a couple of months ago, that’s more than a 70% price increase. Soy Milk was up 30%, chicken up 35%, my small bowl of peeled mixed fruits up 40%. My surprise wasn’t that prices had risen but that our basic food bill had gone up by that much. Added to this critical household expense, the combined weekly gas bill for the family’s two now impractical SUVs was somewhere in the vicinity of $150/ week. It is no surprise that last week I saw my husband trying to revive our old 4 cyclinder Nissan Altima, a much more efficient gas consumption machine, but a machine which had been sitting idle in our yard for the past two years.
Every summer I look forward to planting a small kitchen garden in our backyard. In the past, we did it as a hobby and to pass the gardening skill onto our small children. This summer, we’re planning a much larger garden and will plant a variety of vegetables and even some fruits like watermelon and strawberries. We have essentially cut back on our weekly restaurant outings and we focus more on cooking and eating at home. We have educated our kids on managing costs around the house and asked them to keep doors closed and to turn off electrical appliances when not in use. For our family, we are definitely responding to the economic contraction hitting the US economy. Keep in mind that we consider ourselves middle class, we’re financially ok, but we can’t help but feel a cognitive unease about what we read in the papers daily and what we experience first hand in stores.
In addition, many companies are feeling the economic pinch and are responding by laying off workers. I happen to know maybe nine families affected recently by the unemployment of someone in the household. I travel to Guyana on business at least once every couple of months, I had planned to increase that travel to monthly trips. Today, not only has my average cost per ticket gone up by around 40%, but flights have decreased significantly enough to have adversely impacted my ability to easily get to Guyana from Georgia. Needless to say, I have delayed my planned monthly trips.
My family is not alone in making adjustments because of the current economic environment; in fact I would say that most have gone even further than we have. According to Bob Willis, in his recent Bloomberg.com article, “US consumer confidence fell more than forecast in March as Americans’ outlook for the economy dropped to the lowest level since Richard Nixon was president.…”. He goes on to say that, “Declining stock and property values have unnerved Americans, heightening concerns that spending will falter. A drop in spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the economy, would deepen what economists say is almost certainly the second recession of the decade.” Mr Willis goes further by saying that, “The proportion of people who expect their incomes to rise over the next six months fell to 14.9 percent, the lowest since record keeping began in 1967, from 18 percent. The share expecting more jobs dropped to 7.7 percent from 8.9 percent.”The lesson for citizens living in Guyana is that since your family members living overseas are taking steps to spend responsibly and reduce unnecessary expenses, you should too.
With rapidly increasing food costs in Guyana, families can scarcely afford not to plant a little kitchen garden, raise a few chickens or ducks, cut back on the consumption spending and make smart financial decisions. A brilliant but despised Guyanese leader once proclaimed that we should be able to “Feed, Clothe & House ourselves”. Plant where there is unused land, he espoused. If we could just master the “Feed” component of this statement, we’d be able to better manage the national risks associated with rising food prices. We have the land, the sunshine and lord knows we have the rain. We just need to cultivate the national will. Let’s start now to plant something, if not you’ll have to start from scratch when those barrels stop coming.
