$4.90 A Kilo

Life in the modern age seems to be one gargantuan orgy of punishment propelling us towards blindness and complacency.

Bananas are $4.90 a kilo if you buy them from the Big Supermarkets. New Supermarkets are popping up all over the place, you’d be hard pressed to find anyone living more than five kilometres away from one of the Big Two these days (at least in the Capital Territory). That’s life under a corporate Duopoly in a country that’s becoming more hollowed out by Late-Stage Capitalism by the day.

It’s not just bananas, either. Damned near everything on the shelves has been hitting the kind of prices that would have been thought of as insane just four years ago…and they keep going up. They keep telling us over and over again that “inflation is coming down” and “you should start to see lower prices soon”, and then prices go up again. When I can actually afford to do my own grocery shopping, it’s a barebones menu - cereal, milk, ingredients for salad wraps, microwave meals, and of course cigarettes. I can’t afford to Live Large save for one day a fortnight where I just stop giving a damn, and I always feel my wallet tightening in my pocket the very next day.

I don’t want to live a life of Luxury, now or ever. I have no lust for excess and no ambitions towards opulence. None of that interests me, and that’s not to mention the corrupting influence that money has in an era where we have all been convinced to ferociously compete with each other to climb one more rung up a ladder that keeps growing ever upwards. Your average schmuck will more than happily kick the heel of their boot in the face of anyone trying to climb up and occupy their position. Just let me party with my feet on the ground, goddamnit.

One brief and likely temporary reprieve has been the decrease in the cost of petrol, at some places by more than 30c from what it was just one month ago.

A new petrol station opened up a couple of kilometres down the road from my apartment. I drove past it on its opening day and the price of Unleaded was at $1.91 per litre as opposed to the $2.19 on the board at the 7-Eleven five hundred metres away. “Now that’s how you do business!” I said to myself as I passed the illuminated price-sign.

The next morning when I had some errands to run and I realised that my fuel light had come on the night before, it wasn’t a hard choice as to where I was going to fill up. Damn near filled my car’s entire tank for a little over fifty dollars. Went inside to pay and struck up a conversation with the man working the counter after I told him “If you keep prices that low you’re going to make every other servo in the valley sweat like pigs in the sun.”

“We are going to try to keep our prices as low as possible.” he replied in the most polite manner I’d encountered from a counter worker in weeks.

“Then you’ll be seeing a hell of a lot more of this ugly mug because I henceforth categorically refuse to fill my tank at any other business!” I tried to articulate my words properly but stumbled over a few, a minor and not-unfunny side effect of my new medication.

Driving through the exit, I took a longer way home than was necessary. I had a full tank of fuel for the first time in the year that I’ve been driving this car, and I wanted to see if the new kids on the block had shocked their competitors into lowering their prices.

The 7-Eleven five hundred metres down the road had already lowered the price of their Unleaded to $2.06. A reduction of 13 cents in less than 24 hours - unheard of! That’s the kind of fierce competition we sorely need - a loud “FUCK YOU!” to the businesses which had kept on steadily ramping up their prices knowing that their customers would groan and complain before pulling out their cards to pay for it.

Low price and a polite chat with staff - a stark difference to the day a month or so prior to that one when I had waited in queue to pay the exorbitant cost of my fuel behind a mean old lady screaming violent threats at the cashier’s face over some dispute I could not comprehend, if her complaints had made any sense in the first place.

When she turned around to leave she saw me standing behind her, the big barefoot Freak dressed all in black with dark makeup smeared around my eyes, and aimed her ire at me. “Don’t come back here tomorrow unless you want to be blown up with the rest of the place!” she yelled right at my face, breath smelling of garlic and tooth decay.

“I filled up today, why would I be back here tomorrow?” I shot back at her as she was stomping her way through the door on the dry and cracked skin of her feet, followed by a “Good luck with all of it, ma’am!”

The poor counter worker had a look on his face like he’d just been thrown into an arena with a half-dozen starved wolves. Whatever it was that the dispute had been about, it was Not His Fault - he had just started his shift less than an hour ago, and it was the first time I had seen him working there in at least a week.

It’s the dystopia of capital that has everyone acting like stark-raving lunatics, myself included. Each of us is only one bad day away from being in the sordid place that mean old woman was at that day.

The Fat Cats keep jamming the prices up on the essentials. Am I insane for believing that everything we inherently require to survive another day in this awful world should be free of charge? That’s what we pay tax for goddamnit, but the government sees fit to piss our taxes right up the wall in exchange for nuclear submarines we have no need for. Prices go ever-upwards, our corporate overlords know that we’ll either cough up whatever they demand or we’ll die, and they have no concern for dead customers.

To add insult to injury, no one seems mad enough to do something about it. In any other century we would have reached the pitchforks-and-torches stage six months ago, but not in the Twenty-First Century. Big Business married toxic individualism to create a culture where your average person is more concerned about their bottom line than about creating easier and better living conditions for their neighbours. It’s blanket dominance of a “Fuck You, Got Mine” attitude imported wholesale from the States. Every person is the main character now, so hell-bent on their personal crusades that the idea of full-scale revolution has become a modern pipedream.

Maybe it’s not so much a pipedream. Prices are going up across the board, and it’s not just food and booze; the market for narcotics has perfectly mirrored the market for the legal stuff too.

The price of a single ounce of weed has only increased since the black market couriers jacked up their fees in the early days of the Pandemic. They had the same epiphany that the rich had had - “People are willing to pay more! Why should we ever bring the price back down?” You would be hard-pressed finding a tab of acid for under thirty dollars these days, a far cry from when you could pay twenty for a single, or as low as ten per tab in bulk. Quality of everything has increased, but it’s not the exotic black market you’ll find across the pond.

Against all odds, it’s the price of cocaine that has seemed defiantly stable in the face of it all. $350 a gram, and I hear the purity is no worse than it used to be. Still far too expensive a drug for my meagre budget, and foreigners gawk when you tell them that price. It’s still thirty dollars per gram in most countries.

If you’re not living well off the grid, growing your own food, and cutting expenses at every turn then life in the modern age seems to be one gargantuan orgy of punishment propelling us towards blindness and complacency. No one is quite angry enough to force it to stop, myself included, and our elected representatives are in the Fat Cats’ pockets rummaging around for what amounts to table scraps.

We’ve been letting the bastards win. We’ve slept through the intermission, the Third Act is about to begin, and it’s make-or-break.