Silly me. All this time I’ve been investigating investments like stocks and buying toilet rolls for minor Canadian railway stations when all along I should have been buying and hoarding supermarket cheese instead.
Lesson learnt, off to the cheese aisle!
Remember when supermarket cheese was $6-8 a kilo?
And we’re talking plain no frills tasty cheese too, not your gooey Camembert smoothness or anything stuffed with dried fruits and various nut pieces. Yes I’m reliving those heady pre-pandemic and BCOL days (Before Cost of Living) where a crisp 10 dollar note could buy you a solid kilo of hearty, dependable supermarket cheese of the tasty variety ready to make your humble ham and cheese sanga complete and you’d still have enough for a handful of said ham from the deli (if it was on special).
But now welcome to 2024 where the same kilo of supermarket cheese will now set you back an eye watering $14 (and a little over half of that will net you 500gms). I kid you not, behold the worn out camera phone evidence.
Which means everything from Tuesday taco night to cheese scone Sundays (possibly not a thing but I feel it should be) have now become even more expensive in the process. And what’s cabana going to do now if cheese becomes unaffordable?
(Seriously, with prices this high for a bog standard block of cheese, even the cost of lamb is starting to look reasonable.)
Now cards on the cheese platter here, I will admit I did not buy the $14 block. That’s a little too rich a dairy for my cheese enjoying blood. But I did go the slightly cheaper option of the produce of the Hillview cows. The vegetarian cows obviously as marked, not those vicious meat loving bovines we hear so much about.
This still set me back $10.50 though, a far cry from those glorious $6 a block days. Sigh, take me back..
Supermarket cheese in 2024 is the lettuce of 2022
I know reliving this particular rough time in Australia might be alarming for some but I think this post warrants it, because there was a dark time in our unique history where a head of Iceberg Lettuce would set you back almost 12 bonza buckeroos. Yes 12 dollars for something that was mostly water when you could spend less than 10 dollars and buy yourself 14400 mls of water in a 24 bottle pack and still almost equal the water content of the green stuff.
Not that I ever met anyone who ever spent that much on one mind you, even KFC looked at the price due to a countrywide shortage and went ‘Welp, how about we try cabbage instead?’.
The good news is that eventually we grew some more and the price went back to as close to normal as it could. Although now somehow I feel producing more of anything like your humble supermarket cheese isn’t going to help the everything is awesome expensive way of life at the moment.
Gah, if only my crystal ball warned me so I could stock up on blocks when they were cheap and do some Facebook Classifiedsesque black marketing now. ‘You want some cheese pal? I’ve got the tasty you need right here, fresh from the deep freeze – just $12 and you can feed the wife and kids..’
Although if things keep rising (and they don’t seem to be dropping in a hurry here), maybe it’s not too late to jump on the cheese train? Potentially save up for just a couple of blocks set aside to maybe use as a house deposit down the track? (pun intended.)
Maybe I could finally buy a house with some financial building blocks…made out of cheese?
Post 2024 possible futures for a 1kg block of Supermarket cheese
-Using in place of the tradies slab. ‘I know you usually like to get paid in beer, but what can you build me for a kilo of tasty?’
-Pay for kids schooling.
-Get a better initial interest rate by slipping your bank manager a slice (of cheese.)
-Watch the influx of new Border Security episodes where people from overseas get caught with imported cheese blocks at the airport, feign ignorance of said cheese and then immediately blame their wives for doing the packing.
-One of the cases in Deal or No Deal contains a kilo of Supermarket cheese instead of dollar amount (probs the $1000 case)
-A Christmas bonus Kraft Single in my pay packet? Now we’re talking!