Marble Falls       Watching the shake and bake in the wake of the election reminds me of a universal law of looking at money, I learned as an organizer working for ACORN and presenting budgets, expenses, and audits to the board over the years.  The questions from people were rarely about the big items like grants or contracts received or even the bulk items like the more than 50% spent on staff salaries, but were always about the little things, like what were the items included under “miscellaneous” or how did mileage payments work.

That was a life lesson for me there.  Economists might focus on the macro, but people – our people anyway – focus on the mini.  I think that’s part of the problem that Biden and then Harris faced.  They may have prevented a recession, wrangled inflation to a virtual standstill, and seen the big ticket economy in the USA go gangbusters, but people in general pay attention to the mini-money of our lives, not the mega-money of the rich and the nation.  The numbers there are just too big to have real meaning at the street level.

The price of coffee is what slapped me in the face, partially because I depend on that as my drug of choice.  I used to drink it like a fish, when I lived on cigarettes, coffee, and hamburgers when I was younger, and it’s still as a struggle many days on the road for me to hold it down to 5 or 6 cups a day.  Get out of here with talk about decaf, ugh!  The other part of it, of course in the way that one thing – that thing – led to another, is that we ran a social enterprise coffeehouse, Fair Grinds, for almost a dozen years.

It wasn’t long ago that I remember my daughter complaining about a neighborhood bakery that was pricing a cup of coffee at $4, and, in her words, it wasn’t “even good,” when at the same time, Fair Grinds could hardly charge $2 for a cup to compete. Now, that’s not unusual anymore.  Ask Google about the average price of a cup of coffee at Starbucks, the dominant market mover, and the answer is $3.65, ranging from $2.95 to $4.15.  Starbucks has raised its prices so often the last couple of years, that it was big news when the new CEO promised in an effort not to lose their customer base that they wouldn’t raise prices throughout the next year.

At Fair Grinds, our cold brew was legendary as a drink of choice for millennials.  My son was asked as a favor by a loyal former customer, if he would make a big batch for a special event, so of course he agreed.  When he went to our old supplier to buy a 5-pound bag that cost $50 three years ago, it was now over $90.  I’m no George Bush, the first.  I carry weight in the grocery shopping category.  I drink coffee and chicory, common in New Orleans, and a few other places like Chennai and Hanoi.  Two years ago, a pound cost about $3.69, and sometimes less on special.  For the record a pound of coffee is not a pound but depending on the supplier 12 or 13 ounces not 16 – shrinkage to price is NOT a new thing!  The other day, I paid over $6 and change.  If some people use skirt lengths and other funky measures in reckoning with peoples’ economics, coffee is the stand-in for me.

Biden and Harris couldn’t win this argument at the grassroots level, from what the election seems to indicate.  Trump is about to have a rude awakening as well with all of his tariff talk, like a 25% penalty for Mexico and Canada, and lord knows what for China.  It’s all blah, blah, blah to people now, but when they see 20 to 40% price increases at Walmart, I’ll take the bet on how fast Trump’s popularity hits the skids.  It’s the little things people notice, and it’ll hit hard.