Not so much a "spree"...

At lunchtime today I ducked down to the small mall next to work to check out some clothing that had caught my eye in passing recently. Very nice stuff - but SJOE! - pricey!

There seems to be a bit of a trend in SA. Prices shooting sky-high on everything. Today we had a 69c per litre increase in petrol costs. That's going to rocket off into space and come back pushing up food prices, clothing prices, cost of living in general...

Already people are taking fat chances charging whatever the heck they want to - and the meek folk that we are, we pay up. Shrug our shoulders and say "oh well, that's life". While getting seriously ripped off.

The thing is this - we're sometimes paying way, way more than many other places for our goods. The same thing will cost a fraction of the price in another country, but our suppliers see fit to simply push things up to as much as they can get away with.

Our steel, our wool - all get exported for processing elsewhere and we buy them back at a higher price. Across industries it's the same story.

And what does this have to do with my shopping spree? Well there was a lovely knit top - heavy t-shirt material if you will - in the window of a smaller shop. I figured it was a boutique, so I'd probably have to fork over about a hundred bucks. Actually no - it was 300... for a T-SHIRT basically!!! Needless to say, I'm a bit disillusioned.

And that shopping spree I was hoping for might not materialize after all. At least not to the extent of my wishlist. Not if this is the general trend, which I suspect it is.

Meantime I wonder why 4 bags of groceries cost me over 500 bucks this afternoon, and whether I'd better start commuting by horse.