There's a Place, and it's called Aldi-land

Monday, after over a month of not going to the grocery store, one of my friends did me the favor of introducing me to a new grocery store called Aldi. Though Tom Thumb is normally my store of choice, I decided to try it out. 


I was completely amazed with the amount of food I got for the small price I paid. Normally, since I apparently only go to the store once a month, my grocery bill ends up being about $100, if not more. My bill at Aldi was a grand total of.... $41.84. With that miniscule amount, I got:


-- A bag of spinach leaves
-- A package of mushrooms
-- 2 pounds of grapes
-- Hummus
-- A block of swiss cheese
-- Fresh Mozzarella cheese
-- An entire bag of onions
-- An entire bag of bananas
-- A bag of organic baby carrots
-- A mango
-- Tomatoes on the vine
-- An avocado
--- 3 cloves of garlic
-- Granola bars
-- Chewy bars
-- Peanut butter
-- Dijon mustard
-- Sandwich bags
-- Golden raisins
-- Chili powder
-- 18 rolls of toilet paper
-- 1 gallon of milk


I was amazed by some of the prices on this list. Take tomatoes on the vine for example (the baby kind). At Tom Thumb you would pay a good $5.00, same with the baby carrots. I only paid $1.49: more than half of what I would normally pay. My entire gallon of milk was only $.99. I felt like I was back in the 1980s, where everything was much cheaper, and the millennium inflation had not yet kicked in. 


After going to this unbelievable wonderland, I got to thinking: How did everything get so expensive? The price that we pay for some things (cough, a cup of coffee at Starbucks, cough) are so ungodly expensive, yet we pay the price in a heartbeat. I know that if my grandparents were still alive they would be in shock. When they were young, they only had to pay something like $.50 to get into a movie. Now, we pay $10, if not more. 


I wonder what would happen if we tried out reverting our prices back to what they originally were before inflation. Would it make our economy crash? Or would it be beneficial to it because people would be more willing to spend money since they'd be getting their dollar's worth?


Since I'm not an economist, I don't really have an answer to this. But I do know that I will be shopping at Aldi way more often. For the record, the shopping center that Aldi is in (off of Abrams and Skillman) is phenomenal if you're trying to keep you wallet thick. There's a dry cleaning place in the same center with incredibly low prices; one time I brought in a white silk blouse that my messy-eater self spilled a bunch of queso on and the price to flawlessly bring the stain out cost less than $3.