Back when gas was only about two dollars a gallon I enjoyed a large vanilla latte from Starbucks pretty much everyday. It cost me about four dollars per latte, or twenty-eight dollars a week, but I didn’t mind. However, as the prices at the gas pump started to skyrocket I, like most Americans, started looking for places I could cut back. You know, things I could give up.
When I realized that I was grumbling about spending right at $4.00 dollars for a gallon of gas, but then would happily pop into Starbucks and spend $4.17 for a 20-ounce latte (which works out to $26.69 a gallon!) I knew I had to give up my daily Starbucks fix.
Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t totally given up my venti, vanilla latte, but I have gone from enjoying one a day to only having one or two a month.
Now what I do for my caffeine fix is either make it at home, or go to Exxon where a 20-ounce coffee is only about one dollar.
This morning, I was standing in line at Exxon waiting to pay a dollar for my Bengal Traders Gourmet Coffee when I became nosey and started paying attention to the guy in front of me.
It seems he only had ten dollars and wanted a snack, some cigarettes and some gas.
After finding out that if he purchased both the snack and the cigarettes he wouldn’t even be able to buy a single gallon of gas he started trying to decide what to put back.
Now, the choice seemed obvious to me and I desperately wanted to step forward and offer this poor man some of my newfound “latte give up” wisdom. I didn’t, but the teacher in me was chomping at the bit.
If he had given up the cigarettes, at five dollars a pack…that’s 1.25 gallons of gas. That means he would have been able to buy his snack plus two a little over two gallons of gas.
As it turns out, he slid the snack across the counter and purchased the cigarettes plus about $4.50 in gas.
What really got me was the fact that this guy wasn't millions of miles away in some poor third-world country. No, this was a guy living right here in Dallas and he was having to make financial choices that to me seemed rather trivial.
That’s when I realized that things aren’t bad for me and I really don't have a clue what the rising means to most people. Sure, I had to stop buying an expensive latte each day, but did I really?
Truth be told I didn’t have to, I chose to. Why did I choose to? I think I decided to give them up because it makes me feel like I was being financially responsible, or something like that.
As I walked out to my car with my coffee, I topped off my gas tank and looked over to see that I had just added $69.66 worth of gas to my mornings purchase. And I felt a little strange.
When it’s all said and done, do I complain about the price of gas? I don’t go out of my way to, but when the topic of conversation rolls around, and it always seems to these days, I’m quick to report on the gallon price of a Starbucks latte and then mention how I gave them up to save some cash.
I think I'm becoming a democrat right before your eyes.
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