Disney thinks you will pay more for fruit with their logo on it

Buying veggie and fruit combination trays are always more expensive than buying it individually and making your own combination plate. Grocery stores have been selling this convenience to adults for quite a while, but now Disney wants to market it to your kids.

Disney has previously sold fruits with character stickers on the packaging as well as frozen pizza and hamburger patties made in the shape of Mickey Mouse's head.

I really want to know who bought hamburger patties in the shape of a Mickey head. Making Mickey's head out of ground hamburger seems to be the simplest thing anyone could do yourself, ever.

Food Stamps to buy junk?

I was in the store behind a woman in line with 2 kids. What I saw made me search out more information about food stamps, food stamp fraud, and shopping behavior. This family bought a couple gallons of milk with food stamps. It took quite a while, because not only did they have to fill out their little ticket and run it like a check through the machine, they had to run it as a separate transaction. You see, I don't think the government would be happy knowing they gave food stamps to this family if they knew what else they were buying.

When I sought out program requirements, I had to ask myself whether or not this particular family looked like someone who would qualify. Assuming she was married, she must have a household income of less than $1,613. The woman in front of me wearing nice clothes, sipping a Starbucks-whatever, and talking on a brand new Treo/Blackberry-type cellphone certainly didn't look like she was insolvent.

I suspect I had witnessed Food Stamp fraud.

Here's a little excerpt from a food stamp program:

Food stamp benefits...can be used in supermarket checkout lines only for the purchase of food.

What I witnessed instead was the food stamps, instead of buying food for hungry people, simply subsidized their other frivolous purchases. This family's cart (run up separately) also contained: a DVD player, several new DVDs, a case of Cola Cola, a case of beer, a few kid's toys, a cordless home telephone, and a bunch of other miscellaneous items that I didn't see.

Food stamps make it possible for such working poor families to stretch their income.

Yes it does. It is giving them free milk so they can buy $200 worth of frivolous junk. Our tax dollars hard at work.

The wine debate

We've all heard that drinking a glass of wine a day is good for you. The limit, I've read, is 2 glasses for an adult male and 1 glass for an adult female per day. It is supposed to do all kinds of nice things to your body and to your heart so long as you consume it in moderation.

I'm sure there is a debate on this, but as big wine drinkers I was interested in how this would impact our budget. Let's assume that we can stomach a cheap $10 1 liter bottle of red wine. If we each consume 6 oz of wine every night over dinner (that's 1 glass apiece) we will have emptied 2.5 bottles a week, or 10 bottles a month for a total of $100.

Ouch. Over our lifetime (assuming we live to, say, 75) we will have spent $54,000 on wine. That's just the glass of wine over dinner! That's an opportunity loss of $500,911 assuming 8%.

Of course we could also save the money and buy all the wine at the back end. Given 2% inflation, each bottle will cost $24 and we can buy 20,871 liter bottles of cheap red wine. That would definitely encourage the grandkids to stop by.