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Category: business

Tuesday, 31 January 2012

08:22 – I just filed my North Carolina E-500 Sales Tax report. As always, I deeply resent being forced to function as an unpaid tax collector for the state of North Carolina. North Carolina already has self-reporting of use tax for out-of-state purchases. Why can’t it do the same for sales tax on in-state purchases? This shouldn’t be my problem.

I’m still going through the book session by session, listing what’s to be supplied with the biology kits. Once I get a final bill of materials, I can start generating POs for the components I need to order and then build a prototype kit to figure out what size box we’ll need, how the stuff will be packaged, and so on. Then we can get the first batch of 60 kits actually built.

Meanwhile, I’ll be juggling edits on the biology book with a re-write of the forensics book to make it kit-based.

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Friday, 7 October 2011

10:37 – I’ve just had my first report of shipping damage on a kit, in this case a broken thermometer. The buyer wanted to know if there was anywhere local that she could buy another one. I apologized for the inconvenience, and told her I’d get a replacement in the mail this afternoon, which should arrive Monday. It surprised me that it would even occur to her that the breakage was her problem.

That is, perhaps, a commentary on the declining level of customer service among many American companies. Not all, by any means. Companies like LL Bean and Costco do well, in no small part because their policy is to treat their customers (and employees) as they themselves would want to be treated. That used to be the norm for American businesses: “The customer is always right.” That’s the type of business I patronize, and I’ve always known that when I started a business, that’s the way I’d treat my own customers.

Doing so is simple enlightened self-interest. Treat customers badly, and they’ll never buy from you again. They’ll also tell everyone they know of their experience. Treat customers right, and you’ve made a friend for life. They’ll continue buying from you, and they’ll recommend you to their friends.

Solving a problem for a customer at no expense to them often involves incurring a cost, so “results-oriented” short-term thinkers consider it foolish to take a loss rather than charge the customer again. In fact, that small short-term loss nearly always translates into a much greater long-term profit. For example, one person who bought one of our kits emailed me to say that she’d spilled one of the chemicals, and asked if she could buy another bottle. Sure, I could have charged her for the replacement bottle and shipping costs, and she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But instead I just shipped her a replacement bottle without charge. Counting the item itself, as well as time, packaging, and shipping costs, that might’ve cost me $10 or $12. But that small loss translates into a very happy customer. She’ll tell her friends, and some of those friends may in turn become new customers.

13:37 – Colin is closely related to both Duncan and Malcolm, with several recent ancestors in common, so it’s no surprise that Colin shares many of Duncan’s and Malcolm’s personality traits. Colin is much nearer in personality to Duncan than Malcolm in most respects, and I was reminded of one of them a minute ago, when I gave Colin a dog treat.

Malcolm would eat anything we were eating, without hesitation. Pickles, celery, anything. In fact, Malcolm would eat anything we offered him. That made it very easy to give him pills. Hold down the pill to him, and he’d take it gently and swallow it without question. Duncan, on the other hand, was almost insulting. He’d beg when we were eating, but if we offered him some of what we were eating, he’d sniff it thoroughly before eating it, just to make sure. I actually had a conversation with Duncan about this, explaining that he was insulting us by implication, suggesting that something good enough for humans might not be good enough for him.

And Colin is much like Duncan in that respect. I just went into the kitchen to refill my Coke, and decided to give Colin a dog treat. He watched me take down the container from the shelf. He knows that container is full of dog treats. He sat on command, waiting for the treat. When I held it down to him, he spent two or three seconds sniffing it before he took it. Just like Duncan.

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Sunday, 25 September 2011

09:55 – Barbara had to take her mom to the emergency room yesterday. Her mom was in pretty severe distress, but refused to go to the hospital, so Barbara rushed over to take charge of things. Fortunately, the problem turned out to be relatively minor, or at least as minor as such things can be for a woman in her 80’s. The doctor put her on antibiotics and sent her home, where she’s now doing fine.

I see that the EU authorities and the IMF plan to introduce another smoke-and-mirrors campaign to fool investors into holding worthless government bonds a while longer, thereby staving off the inevitable catastrophic eurozone defaults for a few weeks or months longer. They’ve announced that they’re boosting the last-resort bailout mechanism to €1.7 trillion. Three problems with that: First, €1.7 trillion is still much, much too little to backstop the worthless eurozone government debt. Second, the additional money is imaginary; it doesn’t actually exist other than by an accounting trick. Third, investors are already fully aware of points one and two.

As I’ve said repeatedly, I hope the US government is not foolish enough to throw money down this rathole, either via direct subsidies or via the IMF. Unfortunately, the available evidence tells me that the US government is likely to jump in with both feet. It’ll be much too late to help, of course, but it will at least succeed in transferring a considerable portion of EU liabilities to US taxpayers. Which has probably been the agenda all along.

A cautionary tale about Greek politicians

12:01 – I just did a field-expedient packaging test on the new arrangement for test tubes. I put together six assemblies, each of one glass test tube inside a 50 mL polypropylene centrifuge tube with the cap screwed on. (I really must start calling these things “large test tubes” or something; few kit buyers have any idea what a self-standing centrifuge tube is.) I packaged six of those assemblies in a one-quart ziplock bag, took it down to the basement, and dropped it on the concrete floor several times from head height (~ 2 meters). There was no damage to the contents, and even the bag looks no different than it did. That should be sufficient to protect the tubes from shipping damage, especially since they’ll be in a box with additional cushioning.

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Wednesday, 31 August 2011

09:20 – We’re well into the endgame for the euro. Even with the ECB buying huge amounts of Italian debt on the secondary market, yields on new Italian debt crept above 5% yesterday in the first auction since the ECB began propping up Italy. And one of the German heavy-hitters has finally publicly come out in favor of Germany leaving the euro. (Of course, he’s merely said out loud what most Germans are already thinking.)

German business chief calls for country to quit euro and join new currency with Austria, Holland and Finland

If (when) that happens, the Euro crashes and burns. Those holding euro-denominated debt are likely to lose nearly all of their investments. Without the northern tier backing it, the euro is backed only by countries that are already bankrupt, and will have no option but to inflate the euro into worthlessness. A 100 euro note may buy a cup of coffee, if you’re lucky. Of course, the upside is that Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, and France won’t have to default on their debts. They’ll simply pay them off in worthless euros, after which no doubt these weak economies will soon revert to their former local currencies. The other upside is that having devalued their currencies, these weak countries will be able to export much, much more to nations with stronger currencies, thereby allowing their economies to grow again after many years of zero or negative growth. That may be some consolation to their citizens, who won’t be able to afford to import goods from wealthier countries.

Barbara and I were watching something the other night in which one of the characters was pregnant and several of them were sitting around discussing what a horrible idea it was for a pregnant woman to drink any alcohol at all. This is one of those things that everyone knows that turns out not to be true. There is zero evidence that light to moderate alcohol consumption is dangerous for the mother or the fetus, and in fact there is some evidence that one drink or less per day is actually beneficial. Intuitively, it would seem to most reasonable people that heavy drinking is a really bad idea for a pregnant women, but then it’s a really bad idea for anyone else as well.

When I visited the Wikipedia page on Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, I learned that 30% to 33% of pregnant women who consume 18 drinks per day or more give birth to babies with FAS. I assume they meant 18 drinks per week; at 18 drinks per day the baby would be born an alcoholic. But perhaps they really did mean 18 drinks per day, because FAS is relatively rare, so perhaps a 30% to 33% incidence does require that much alcohol consumption.

Clicking around Wikipedia, I came across something that made me wonder if there are words other than “foot” whose plurals vary depending on context. Not usage; those are relatively common. Context. The phrase in question concerned someone’s height, which it gave as “five feet and eight inches”. My first thought was that the person who wrote the article was not a native English speaker, or at least not a native US English speaker. In US English, when referring to a person’s height, the plural of “foot” is “foot”, “and” is never used between the numbers, and “inches” is always understood rather than spoken. For example, if someone asked me how tall my friend Paul Jones is, I would reply “six foot four” (or just “six four”). Conversely, if someone asked me how tall the Washington Monument is, I would reply “555 feet, 5 inches”. So, are there any other words whose plurals are context-dependent? I can’t think of any.

12:28 – Barbara was playing around with the new Pentax K-r DSLR the other day, and shot a few images of Colin at 28 weeks old. Here’s a crop (about 4.8 MP from the original 12.2 MP file).

There’s nothing in the image to provide scale, but Colin is one huge Border Collie puppy. He’s about as large at 28 weeks as a typical adult male BC. We don’t have a scale, but I estimate his weight is in the 50 pound (23 kilo) range already and he can stand with his paws on my chest.

I may reconsider having the camera set to save both RAW and JPG by default. The JPG images it produces are fairly large (about 5.5 MB), and the camera’s processor does a very good job of compression. I looked at zoomed in portions of various images in RAW and JPG form. RAW has a bit more detail, but not much. So I’ll probably reserve RAW form for times when white balance or brightness range is likely to be a problem.

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Sunday, 28 August 2011

12:17 – Irene nailed the North Carolina and Virginia coastal areas pretty badly, but we saw no effects in Winston-Salem other than a stiff breeze and a bit of rain. This storm had the potential to make landfall as a Category 3 or even 4, so most of those in the affected areas are probably feeling pretty lucky that it was “only” a Category 1. Of course, that’s small consolation to those who were killed or injured by this storm, or suffered severe property damage.

I’m still working on the biology kits (and book). We made up subassemblies yesterday for another 18 chemistry kits, which means I need to start getting orders ready for more components. While I’m doing those orders, I’ll add the stuff I need to prototype the biology kit and produce maybe a dozen of them.

I periodically get emails and a few comments about how the Euro crisis is not really serious. Those messages invariably comment on the size of the US debt relative to Euro nation debts. Now, it’s true that the US is highly indebted, but what really counts is how much each country has to pay on that debt. Assuming that Greece, Italy, and the US all had to refinance all of their existing debt tomorrow at the current bond yields, here are some rough numbers with interest payments as a percentage of GDP.

US – interest payments of about $200 billion a year on outstanding debt of about $15 trillion, with GDP around $15 trillion = 1.33% of GDP

Italy – interest payments of about $200 billion a year on outstanding debt of about $3 trillion, with GDP around $2 trillion = 10% of GDP

Greece – interest payments of about $200 billion a year on outstanding debt of about $488 billion, with GDP around $305 billion = 66% of GDP

I’m making some assumptions here that render these percentages meaningless, because the market would not continue to lend money to any of these countries if they attempted to refinance their entire debts at one time. For Italy, I’m assuming yields of about 6.7%. They’re currently right at 5% on 10-year debt, but that’s with the ECB buying Italian bonds like crazy. They can’t do that much longer, and when they stop doing it the yields on Italian bonds will skyrocket. On Greek debt, I’m using the current 2-year yields, which are north of 40%, because few people are crazy enough to lend money to Greece on a 2-year basis, let alone for 10 years. And, of course, these countries don’t need to refinance all of their debt overnight. But Italy and Greece do need to refinance a huge chunk of their current debt over the next few months, and these yields are reasonable in that scenario. In fact, I’d expect to see yields north of 10% if not 15% on Italian debt when the big chunks come due for refinancing, and yields considerably over 50% for Greece. That won’t actually happen, of course, because both Greece and Italy will default first.

Making matters worse, while the US can print as many dollars as it needs to avoid default, that option is not open to Greece or Italy. There are two potential directions this could go. First, Greece and Italy could abandon the euro and return to the drachma and lira, respectively. If that happens, their local currencies will be devalued hugely literally overnight. They won’t be able to buy enough euros to honor their debts, and they will default. Conversely, Germany and the other northern tier countries may abandon the euro and return to their local currencies. If that happens, the countries that remain in the Eurozone will see the value of the euro plummet relative to the northern tier currencies as well as the pound and dollar. The new ECB can print as many euros as it needs to, and it will need a lot to pay off all those debts. Someone who holds a euro-denominated bond for a billion euros will in fact be paid that billion euros. The problem is, those billion euros will be worth probably at most a tenth of what they’re worth now relative to the dollar or pound or Swiss franc. The remaining Eurozone countries become dirt-poor overnight, while the northern tier countries benefit by paying off their euro-denominated debt in euros that are nearly worthless. Of course, the holders of that debt suffer badly, as will holders of any euro-denominated debt. Northern-tier countries see their exports plummet, but those high levels of exports to other EU countries were never anything other than illusory anyway. There’s no point in sending goods to countries that aren’t going to pay for them.

All of this makes me wonder when our politicians are going to wake up to the fact that J. M. Keynes was completely wrong. If they had any sense, they’d be reading F. A. Hayek, who had it completely right all along. Of course, being politicians, by definition they have no sense. And, to a politician, Keynes’ advice to governments to intervene constantly and heavily in markets is much more appealing than Hayek’s advice to keep their damned hands off the markets.

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Friday, 26 August 2011

09:30 – Colin loves sticks, and we always try to keep a “good stick” on hand. That is, one that’s solid wood and maybe a cm or two in diameter by 30 or 40 cm long. Yesterday, I let Colin off leash while I rolled the yard cart from the curb to the back yard and rolled the trash cart up to the curb. He ran around our and our neighbors’ back yards while I was doing that, and when he returned he didn’t have his good stick. So, while I was taking him for a walk, I looked for another good stick. I found what looked like an ideal candidate, but when I picked it up it was rotten and weighed next to nothing.

Which got me to thinking about Steve Jobs, who has just retired as CEO of Apple. Even with Jobs’ retirement, the value of Apple’s outstanding stock is still greater than the cumulative value of Europe’s 91 large banks. Like the stick I rejected, Europe’s banks appear solid but are actually rotten and lightweight.

The main problem is that those banks have huge exposure to Eurozone sovereign debt. Due to an accounting oddity, sovereign debt, regardless of its actual solidity, is always considered to be default-proof, and so is carried on balance sheets at nominal value. The reality is very different, of course. A bank that holds, say, €1 billion of Greek sovereign debt even now carries that debt on its balance sheet as a €1 billion asset. Current yields on 2-year Greek debt are getting very close to 50%, which means that debt should be written down on balance sheets to a small fraction of nominal, if not written off entirely. But the banks haven’t done that, for Greek, Portuguese, and Irish debt or any of the other peripheral sovereign debt, let alone “core” Eurozone debt issued by France or Belgium. The ridiculous bank “stress test” done a couple of months ago estimated that Europe’s largest 91 banks would require only about €2.4 billion to meet capitalization requirements. The reality is that they’ll need more like €150 billion to meet even the minimum requirements with rosy assumptions including high EU growth and no sovereign defaults.

Back in the real world, the truth is that all or nearly all of those banks are already bankrupt, and the EU no longer has the ammunition to do anything about that. The ECB is already bent completely out of its intended shape, engaging in legally-questionable if not outright illegal purchases of sovereign bonds and accepting essentially worthless paper as collateral. In effect, the ECB itself is in deep trouble, with its nominal balance sheet having no relation to reality. Making matters worse, as the EU lender of last resort, the ECB is now attempting to do what the banks themselves should be doing. The situation in the EU is so bad now that banks no longer trust each other. Banks with a temporary surplus would ordinarily do overnight loans of those surplus funds to other banks, earning some interest in the process. Instead, those banks are depositing the excess funds with the ECB, earning only tiny amounts of interest on them.

So it’s true. The ECB and Europe’s commercial banks are rotten sticks. Even Colin wouldn’t touch them.

I just got orders for the last two chemistry kits I had already built, so we’ll build another dozen or so kits this weekend. We’re still in pretty good shape in terms of components to build more kits, but once this batch of components runs out it looks like we’ll have to increase the price of the kits by $10 or so to cover increased costs. I hate to do that, because we’re trying to keep the kits as affordable as possible, but anyone who thinks these massive so-called “quantitative easings” don’t affect prices doesn’t understand economics. The true definition of inflation is “an increase in the money supply”, and quantitative easing is simply a weasel phrase for inflating the currency. That shows up sooner or later, usually sooner, in the prices we pay for everything.

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Thursday, 4 August 2011

09:31 – I read an interesting article the other day on CNN or FoxNews about small business owners pawning their Rolexes to meet payroll, and a second article about lending being extremely tight even for those with top-notch credit ratings. Interest rates are very low, which means nothing if no bank will lend you money.

Fortunately, I don’t want to borrow money. In fact, the last thing I want is to borrow money. That may seem odd for someone who’s just starting a small business, but in my experience the two biggest causes of small business failures are borrowing money and hiring employees. When Barbara and I talked about this new business, I told her that I intended to fund it out-of-pocket and that I would not hire our first employee until Barbara and I were run ragged and also had some assurance that the hectic pace was not merely a seasonal bump in sales. And, even then, I’d almost certainly contract work out or, as a last resort, hire a temp/part-time employee.

The problem with borrowing money or hiring employees is that you give up control by doing so. As long as we avoid either, we don’t have to worry about making a loan payment or meeting payroll, which is the way I want it. Now, if only the US government would be equally careful with our money.

Inventory of the chemistry kits is getting perilously low, so Barbara is taking the day off from work tomorrow to help me build more. We have enough components to build another dozen or so kits, and all but one of the components needed to build 50 or so more beyond that first dozen. The problem is, that one component is back-ordered for about the next three weeks. So we’re going to build all of the kits, but missing that one component. That way, we can just drop in that one component when it finally arrives and have kits ready to ship.

I’m also preparing purchase orders that I can drop on a moment’s notice if kit sales pick up quickly as the new school year approaches. Making up all the chemical solutions for any arbitrary number of kits is a couple days’ work, whether I make up enough for 50 kits or 500. The really time-consuming steps are filling and labeling the containers, assembling and packaging the chemical blocks, making up the small-parts bags, and assembling the kits themselves. For 50 kits, that’s maybe three days’ work for Barbara and me working together.

The media, including most of the financial media, is putting as favorable a spin as possible on today’s Spanish bond auction, although of course the yields remain disastrously high. That WSJ article does mention one significant factor that’s being generally ignored in news reports: a large and increasing percentage of Spanish bond sales are being made to Spaniards. The latest figures the WSJ quotes are for the end of last year. I suspect the percentage of Spanish bonds being bought by non-Spaniards is much lower now. And what few of the reports mention is that Spain has to sell another €38 billion in bonds–more than ten times as much as they sold today–between now and the end of the year. Good luck selling €38 billion worth of bonds into the Spanish economy, which is already nearly saturated.

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Saturday, 23 July 2011

10:45 – My poor FedEx guy must hate me. Yesterday, he delivered several large boxes that contained a couple thousand polyethylene dropper bottles in different capacities and a hundred laboratory splash goggles. I’ll use the dropper bottles to build prototypes and initial inventory for the biology kit that goes with the home biology lab book I’m working on now, as well as in a future forensics kit and possibly some others. The goggles are included in all kits.

In all of the discussion about the Euro crisis, the UK hasn’t gotten much attention other than in that country’s newspapers. From what I’ve read in UK newspapers ranging across the political spectrum, I think it’s safe to say that there’s been a sea change in the attitudes of UK subjects. Previously, a substantial majority were in favor of the UK’s membership in the EU, and the electorate was roughly equally divided pro and con on adopting the Euro. The current numbers are dramatically different. A large majority now opposes joining the Euro–no surprise there given recent events–but the really significant change is that UK voters are now about 3:2 in favor of withdrawing from the EU itself.

They rightly perceive the course of the EU shifting even more strongly toward a fiscal and political union, neither of which is acceptable to a large majority of Brits. Ideally, most Brits would prefer to return to the original common market concept, where trade barriers were minimal but each country retained its own currency and full sovereignty. Even in the absence of full fiscal and political union, Britain has found, as Thatcher warned, that the obvious benefits of EU membership are far outweighed by the hidden drawbacks. Despite the fact that the UK is not a member of the Euro, British taxpayers subsidize other Euro members. For example, a significant percentage of the €50 billion in annual agricultural subsidies paid to French farmers comes out of British pockets. Nor are all the economic costs so obvious. For example, fishing rights have for years been a bone of contention between the UK and the EU.

When all is totaled up, it’s clear that the UK is suffering economically from its membership in the EU, with the economic benefits far, far outweighed by the direct and indirect economic costs. If the EU fractures, as I expect, into one group of wealthier northern nations and a second group of poorer southern nations, I expect to see the UK join the northern group, if indeed it chooses to join any union at all.

12:14 – The morning paper had an article about people flocking to the local Borders for its going-out-of-business sale. The store is advertising “up to 40% off”, which really isn’t much of a deal, even if it applied to most things. One woman quoted in the article mentioned that she’d bought several books at 10% to 20% off list price, which is no deal at all, particularly since all sales are final. As she said, she could have gotten them cheaper at Amazon.

Given the very limited selection at Borders–many publishers stopped sending them new books months ago–they’d have to be offering at least 60% off list on paperbacks and 70% off on hardbacks to temp me in there, and even at that I might not bother. Most of what I’d be looking for is fiction, and most of that I can get for $2.99 or less for my Kindle. And since my Kindle TBR stack is currently at something like 300 titles, I really don’t need any more fiction anyway.

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Wednesday, 20 July 2011

08:53 – In the lead-up to the EU crisis summit tomorrow, it seems that the EU authorities can do nothing but bicker about which unworkable plan each prefers. It seems that the leading candidate is now Euro bonds, which would allow unstable economies like those of Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy, and Spain to issue sovereign debt instruments that are backed by the creditworthiness of Germany and other stronger northern European economies. In effect, this “solution” gives Greece Germany’s credit card and allows Greece to run up essentially unlimited debt which Germany is then responsible for paying. That’s kind of like asking me to co-sign a mortgage loan for an unemployed homeless person. Why would I do that? Why would Germany? If this is the best solution the EU authorities can come up with, the Euro is doomed.

Ultimately, the problem comes down to one of authority versus responsibility. The Europeans have an economic union, but not a fiscal union or a political union. Eurozone member nations are actually not nations in the traditional sense. A nation controls its own money. Eurozone members have given up that control, which amounts to giving up sovereignty. A sovereign nation can never be forced into default on debt instruments denominated in its own currency. The US, for example, is never in danger of defaulting on dollar-denominated bonds because, if push comes to shove, the US can simply print more dollars. The same is not true for Eurozone members, who have accepted responsibility while giving up authority.

The result of all this is that we now have a cat fight, with poor, unproductive, and deeply-indebted EU nations able by their actions to destroy the common currency, and wealthier and more productive nations faced with few alternatives but to pay the huge bills that have been incurred by those profligate nations. What’s worse is that this won’t be a one-time bailout. Those poor nations will continue returning to the well, expecting the richer nations to go on subsidizing them indefinitely. Obviously, that’s unsustainable.

UPS showed up yesterday with boxes from one of my wholesalers, which contain about 20% of the components I need to assemble another 60 chemistry kits. I already had about 10% of the components in hand, and nearly all of the remainder should arrive by the end of this month, with one exception. One small item is backordered, and I can’t find another source for it. It’s due to ship by 15 August, so I’m limited to on-hand inventory for about the next four weeks. Fortunately, this is the slowest time of year for kit orders, so I shouldn’t have to backorder many kits. I hope.

09:45 – I finally decided I had to do something about my inbox. I use it as a kind of pseudo-to-do list, marking action items as “unread” and think-about items as read. As of this morning, I had more than 600 messages in my inbox, some of them from last year. All real messages. So I just spent the last 45 minutes getting rid of the ones that were OBE (most of them), doing something about the ones that still required doing something about, and leaving the ones that require doing something about, but which will require more time than I have to devote to them at the moment. I’m now down to eight messages in my inbox.

Usually, I try hard to keep the number of messages in my inbox small enough that they don’t fill the message-list pane. When a scroll-bar appears for that pane, I know I need to do some pruning. This time, I let it get completely out of control. I’ll try to keep that from happening again.

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Real inflation

One thing I noticed in creating POs and placing orders for science kit components is that we’re experiencing serious inflation. Dollar-wise, most of my orders are to wholesalers, which generally post a price list for a calendar year and then honor those prices all year long. (I wonder how much longer that’ll last).Those orders reflected zero inflation, but of course the reality is that I’m overpaying early in the year and underpaying late in the year.

But for some smaller items it doesn’t make sense to set up an account with a wholesaler. For example, I order Sharpie markers by the dozen from a retailer. Since my last order, the price has increased from $8.76 per dozen to $8.92. That’s only about 2%, but other items are considerably higher. For example, the last time I ordered composition books from Costco, I paid $1.26 each. This time, they were $1.33 each, or a 5.6% increase.

And a lot of vendors are playing games with quantity discounts. For example, last time I ordered three dozen of one item at $0.60 each. The price dropped to $0.50 each on quantity eight dozen, and $0.40 each on quantity 50 dozen. Now, the same item is priced at $0.70 each for under eight dozen, $0.60 each for eight dozen or more, and $0.50 each for 100 dozen or more. I ordered eight dozen this time at $0.60 each, so technically the price remained the same. (Oddly, this time the shipping was actually one cent less, even through I was ordering eight dozen instead of three dozen.) But the reality is that if I’d ordered the same number, my price would have increased from $0.60 to $0.70 each, or about 16.7%.

I’m told that food prices are rising even faster, but Barbara and I don’t track those.

 

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