I stopped for gas the other day, it’s $4.19 a gallon. You swipe your card, you move on. That’s just the baseline price of existing now in Richmond.
Inside, I grabbed a couple things without thinking. A two-pack of Reese’s and an iced tea. The kind of purchase made a thousand times from muscle memory.
$3.45 for the candy. Four bucks for the tea.
I stood there for a second, doing the math. Not trying to solve anything, just trying to understand how we got here. There isn’t a chocolate shortage that I know of. Tea is still leaves and water, right? But the price is the price because it can be.
At the grocery store, everything feels slightly off. The same brands, the same packaging, just lighter in the hand and heavier at the register. A bag of chips that’s mostly air. A pack of ribeyes creeping over $35, with some new explanation each time, a beef shortage, tariffs, take your pick.
Something… something … someone, somewhere, always justifying the number.
Last year it was eggs at $8 or $10 a dozen. Bird flu, wildfires, supply chains, weather. The explanation kept shifting, but the price didn’t. There’s always a story, and that’s the rub. Not just that things cost more, but that the explanation barely matters anymore.
And maybe some of it is true but who is checking the spreadsheets? Who has time? Every time you step out the door, your money disappears a little faster. We spend more and own less. Life starts to feel like a subscription.
At the same time, billionaires are becoming trillionaires. Mega companies are posting record profits and cutting jobs by the thousands.
My health insurance went up $300 a month this year. That’s $3,600 more a year for less coverage.
Data centers are going up across the state, and that’s pushing water rates up too. It is raining all the time in Virginia, but that doesn’t seem to factor in. Power bills are climbing right along with it.
Everything essential costs more, and none of it feels negotiable.
We’ve been looking at buying a house in Richmond. A friend has a place that was listed at $225,000 about a year and a half ago. Now it’s pushing $360,000, according to Zillow. More demand, sure, but the house didn’t change. Just what we’re told it’s worth now.
At work, the emails keep coming. People looking for jobs, a lot of them, every day. Mostly younger folks, just out of school, stepping into a market where entire categories of work are being quietly erased or handed off to machines that don’t need sleep, benefits, or patience.
We’ve got conflicts overseas, tension at home, and a political conversation that feel like scorekeeping. None of it pays the electric bill.
At some point, you start asking a simple question, can I live?
The goalpost isn’t moving anymore. It’s disappearing over the horizon.
Because if the cost of living keeps climbing and wages don’t, if housing becomes something you rent forever, and if healthcare is a luxury until it becomes an emergency, then participation starts to look impossible.
All of this is leading somewhere and it doesn’t look like anywhere good. Who are you selling to when people can’t afford to buy anymore? What happens then?
Or maybe that’s not the point anymore. Maybe the plan is to cash out and leave the rest of us to figure out what’s left. And maybe people reading this are starting to think the same thing, that the move is to take what you can and look out for yourself.
I found myself thinking about all of this while eating a pair of Reese’s cups that cost me $3.45.
Looking down at the package, it felt like evidence. Not of scarcity, but of a system that figured out it can charge more, offer less, and keep everyone guessing. Call it inflation or market forces, that’s the language used to explain it away. You tell yourself whatever makes it easier to swallow.
But it feels like we’re in an era of straight-up greed, and there will be winners, I just wouldn’t bet on it being any of us.
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