Are the markets logical?
Are they rigged?
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And if the answer to either is yes, how do you react?
Farmers talk about this all the time off course, and to many consumers the market is the grocery store.
With half of Canada talking about the infamous $8 cauliflower for more than a week now agriculture and the local food movement have seized the opportunity to point out the need for local sourcing.
If you, or the doctor and teacher down the street are buying food from a local producers the odds of a plummeting Canadian dollar pushing up their prices are reduced, although local shortages are still going to happen from time to time.
But while there has been some very good advice passing around about how if you don't want to pay $8 for a cauliflower, buy cabbage and experiment with the many different ways to cook it.
Or you could try another store.
In the past week when many of my fellow media scribes were expressing concerns about the rising price of food, forgetting we are rapidly approaching Food Freedom Day, we all might have given a few thoughts to how prices are set.
Prices are generally supposed to be set by an agreement between a willing buyer and a willing seller. We can all understand that but sometimes it is let the buyer beware.
In the past week I walked into one grocery store near where I live and cauliflower was back on the shelf and was $7.99.
Across town a slightly less tony store was selling what appear to be the exact same product for $4, while at the same time another store that tries to be a little tonier than both of the first two, was advertising them at two for $5.
How does that make any sense?
I don't claim to know the answer to that. I don't even know if there is an answer.
It may be that one store booked an order early, before the price rose and decided to keep prices low as an incentive for people to shop there, or it may be it's taking a loss to offer than same incentive.
But it's also possible all three stores paid the same price.
I don't know if this says anything about the grain markets, they are also let the buyer and sometimes the seller beware. In both grain markets and grocery markets the individual customer can feel a little, swamped by the power of the entity on the other side of the deal.
Getting personal for a second, my mother is about 91-years-old and no longer shops for food or cooks it, but still likes to talk about doing both.
To be honest there are times when she doesn't remember what day it is. I told her about the vast difference in price of cauliflower right now.
After expressing shock, she put it fairly suscinctly.
Someone is making a lot of money and someone is losing a lot, she told me, and then added, that we just don't know who is on the profit side of the equation.
Thanks Mom. Wisdom is a good thing to have.
