Snappy rejoinder #257:
I was reminded of this when I paid my monthly visit to the butchery (Hirsch’s Meats in Plano) a few days ago.
Some background: Hirsch makes South African boerewors (farm sausage), and they make it really well, to a recipe provided to them by a South African customer as a special order, but which turned out to be a gold mine for them when they made more and put it for sale in the freezer. Unsurprisingly, they have a large clientele of Seffricans, and one of the basket characteristics (told to me by Nancy Hirsch) is that it is the only product in their freezer which is bought in multiples — i.e. more than one pack per customer. I usually buy four at a time, which yields 12 boerewors sausages for my monthly consumption (New Wife doesn’t eat boerewors, never has, so I have them all to myself yum yum).
Now these are not your typical skimpy things like Nathan’s or Oscar Meyer hotdogs. Even after cooking, these are monsters and sometimes I can’t eat a whole one in a bread roll, but have to slice it longitudinally in half to be able to finish it. (The other half goes into the fridge for next day’s brekkie.)
Now this stuff is not cheap. A pack of three boerewors costs about $7.50 – $8.00, which sounds expensive and it is, but it’s a delicacy, made by hand (because of the very specific recipe) and as such very much worth the money. So I typically buy those four packs with a total ring of about $32.
Until the last time I went into the butchery, and discovered that the packs now cost $11 each.
So from now on, I’ll only be buying three packs at a time, yielding nine sausages for the month instead of twelve. Same amount of money, three-quarters of the product.
Which, by the way, is what I told the folks at Hirsch.
Look, I understand the business of retail product pricing; when it comes to foods, I understand it as well as anyone on the world because I did little else but study things like price elasticity and promotion pricing, for well over forty years.
But the plain fact of the matter is that now in my sunset years, I can no longer afford just to pay whatever the price sticker demands. I have a (very) fixed amount of money I can pay for groceries, which means that at some point, I have to cut back — as above — and make do with less. Fortunately, New Wife is an outstanding cook, so making meals from scratch and eating stews, curries and pasta dishes instead of boerewors hot dogs is not that much of a sacrifice, believe me.
But here’s the thing: once a year I host the family Christmas dinner (on Boxing Day and not the 25th), in which I myself prepare a prime rib roast. In the past, that prime rib has always come from Hirsch’s Meats because I’m not prepared to stint on quality for what is, even more than Thanksgiving, our family’s premium gathering of the year.
Well, this year and probably for the entire future, that prime rib roast will be coming not from Hirsch but from Walmart — something which I also told the Hirsch people.
Sic transit emptor.
