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When I was doing my mountain man thing, my shopping list every 2 months looked a lot like a list from the mid 1800s.

Salt, sugar, coffee, flour, tobacco. Lots of people couldn't manage that anymore.

/johnny

When I was growing up in my small town 65 years ago, my uncle owned the main grocery store.

To give my granddaddy something to do, he bought a bunch of turkeys, put them in a pen to be fed by my granddad (and me).

At Thanksgiving and Christmas, he had them cleaned and sold them in the grocery store.

I often think about how much better those turkeys were than the ones sold in stores today...from running around on the ground one day ... on the table the next. Gov't red tape would prevent it today...and those turkeys were so much healthier for people... weren't injected with any growth hormons, etc.

He did the same thing with hogs...would buy them at auction, butcher them and sold them. Produce was produced by local farmers.

Things were cheaper and everybody made a profit because every thing went through fewer hands from farm to market.

I read once, true or not I have no clue, that it cost more to produce the box that cereal comes in than to grow it.

Over the years things grew and the store grew. Before he passed on, I remember hearing him say that his electric bill at the store one month was over $23,000. That was in the '80s.