Gas up means lots of other prices go up too

By Dian Vujovich

While getting gas at Costco in Lantana the other day I said to the attendant that I’d heard gas was going up to five bucks a gallon. He thought that if it does he’d be riding his bike and figured lots of other people wouldn’t be leaving their homes— except to go to work. He’s right. We saw that back when gas hit highs of over $4 a gallon in 2007.

As for the bike riding, well, maybe for him. I tip over too much on two wheels to go that route. But that’s just me.

Back to the cost of a gallon of gas. Around the Palm Beaches I’ve noticed gas averaging around $3.19 a gallon. Outside of Orlando on Thursday it was selling for $3.05. No matter, anytime filling my tank starts getting close to 50 bucks, I start moaning.

Now, I know people who think it’s not worth complaining about because they say we all need to buy gas to run our cars so why bother, but, I see it a little differently. When the cost of gallon of gas goes up, so does most everything petrol- related. Like, the cost of shipping foods across country by truck.

We all eat and food prices don’t go down when it costs more to transport them from the fields and groves to their respective processing plants and then into stores selling them.

The costs of flying increases, too.

I haven’t even touched on the various ways oil is used in products we don’t eat but use. Like those man-made fibers found in everything from our wrinkle-free clothes to our carpets, curtains, detergents, the ink in the pens we write with, every compact disc around and can’t forget our plastic juice, cola and water bottles.

As a reminder, plastics are not biodegradable, break down into toxic chemicals and 96 percent of them aren’t recycled but wind up in landfills and our oceans.

That said, anyone who paid attention to that one word “plastics” in 1967 movie The Graduate, no doubt could have one big fat portfolio by now.

And so it goes with making money—-insights are given, some heard, others not and life goes on no matter what. In this particular instance, however, when the cost of crude goes up, eventually the prices on lots of other things do too.

Bottom line: Those who think things will cost them less in 2011 than they did in 2010 had better think again.