New! ChicagoBoyz Eatin’ Cheap Contest!

In my last post I mentioned some things that blew me away because they were so inexpensive. The main thing I discussed was shaving cream, but I also brought up some food items. That last comment thread went two ways – some took the shaving angle, and some approached the food angle. For this post we will keep going down the food path.

I would like to hear in the comments ways that you eat cheaply. The media is full of stories of doom and gloom about how food is skyrocketing in price, so let’s take the opposite tack and discuss things at the other end of the spectrum. I will start.

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Stupid Quote of the Day

With Earth Day as a backdrop to the concern about use of fossil fuels, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D. Calif.), said that “until we build the replacements for gasoline…there ought to be a prohibition on market speculation.”

(Source: “US Senators Grow Louder In Call For Oil-Market Probe”, Dow Jones Newswires, 4/23/2008)

UPDATE: Fixed the link. Note that the subtly different WSJ title for this article is, “Democrats Demand Probe Of Oil-Market Speculation”.

Some Things Are Still Cheap

Once in a while at work I am taken aback at how cheap some things are. I find myself on occasion wondering how a certain item could be made in China, shipped over here, marked up, then marked up by me and still cost what is a relative pittance.

I have always been amazed at how cheaply you could eat if you needed to. I am not talking about USDA prime cuts here. If you were down and totally out and needed to resort to cheap food just to sustain, you can get by on just a few bucks a day. Mac and cheese is .59. A loaf of bread is still under a buck. Fruit and veggies are still relatively cheap compared to other foods.

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“Then We Came To The End”

Then We Came To The End” is a novel published by first time author Joshua Ferris. The novel is about an ad agency from the height of the dot-com boom down through its eventual nadir, when almost everyone gets laid off.

This book received good reviews from many sources and I was eying it for a while; recently I have been down for the count and had a bit of time to catch up on my reading so I pulled it off my shelf and read it cover to cover.

I used to work at something “close” to an ad agency; during the height of the dot-com boom many firms were gluing together their existing consulting and technology practices with ad agencies to put together a dot-com sheen that led to high (short term) market values. Thus I have some level of experience with the environment that Ferris is describing.

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