Prices at the grocery store

Ok, bear with me while I pull my tinfoil hat a little lower over my ears... that's better. (for the record I don't know who the guy in the picture is... he's on the Wikipedia "Tinfoil Hat" article and it's a public domain photo...)

I think the grocery store is screwing with us again. About three weeks ago I was in there and the price of everything had gone up significantly (in many cases the price doubled).

This I can understand. Between falling dollars (yes, the Canadian dollar is doing very well against the US dollar, that just means it's not being devalued quite as fast (more on this one later...)), high commodity prices (partially due to falling dollars) and high energy costs (again, falling dollars are a major factor here as well) I expected prices to go up.

When I went in last week I noticed that almost everything in the packaged food sections had stickers advertising lower prices. I thought, "that's nice to see," and went on with my business.

This week I actually took a closer look, while scouring my memory to see if I could remember what the price had been.

From what I can tell (based on faulty memory), the price of everything went up a lot three weeks or so ago then came down a little. For example, something they're advertising for sale at $1.99 (reduced from $2.19) was $1.39 a month ago. Big increase, small decrease. Leave the price high(er) for a week so they can legititely say that the price has been reduced. Get people mad then show how you're helping them. Since most people don't pay that much attention, all they see is the card in front of them saying that this product is $0.20 less than they say it was before.

Also, I notice that this did not happen with fresh foods. Their prices went up and stayed up. A 4-pack of peppers I would have paid $4.99 for a month ago, and $5.99 a week ago is now $7.99. Chicken went from $12.50/kilo to $21/kilo.

Ok... not exactly a conspiracy theory but if you give me a couple weeks I'll find some way to link this to Roswell, JFK, the US Federal Reserve (well, the falling dollar again...), 9/11, DDT and China.