Thursday's column

As pundits and brainiacs around the country constantly attempt to determine if we are in a recession, I’ve been looking at my own economic indicator.

I call it the Top Ramen index.

Here’s how it works: When the price of Top Ramen rises, we’re in an economic crisis. When it falls, good times.

I guess I could gauge my economic barometer on other commodities like soybeans, pork bellies, uranium or light sweet crude, but I don’t buy any of that at Staters, Ralph’s, Albertsons or Vons. I’ll bet you don’t either.

The words “light, sweet crude” in the same sentence sound more like a review of a show on Fox than something you can actually buy anyway.

Top Ramen is a commodity, and you can live on it. I know. I did it in college.

Back in the late 1970s and early ‘80s you could buy something like 20 packages of the stuff for a buck. Think about it, that’s breakfast, lunch and dinner for six days.

Other options included Ralph’s Blue Label macaroni and cheese for a dime a box or a $1 jar of Pizza Quick and a $1 loaf of Wonder.

Throw in a case of Lucky Lager at $3.99 and a couple packs of smokes at a buck-and-a-half, a guy could live large for a week with less than 20 bucks.

Lucky Beer had the added bonus of puzzle caps, so who needed the Internet for entertainment?

The inside of the caps had little rebus puzzles that were easy to figure out at first but got harder and harder to solve the deeper you dug into the box.

Midway through a case, you could spend all night figuring out what the combination of the word RUSH, a picture of a hen, a picture of a dress and a picture of a sink meant. Russian dressing! Get it?

It’s been nearly 30 years since I lived so frugally, but I have always paid attention to the price of Top Ramen, boxed macaroni, cigarettes and beer.

Early last year, I popped into a Stater Bros. market and paid $1 for 10 Top Ramens, which meant my dollar bought half the noodles it bought almost 30 years ago. Can’t remember what mac and cheese cost that day, but it was certainly more than a dime a box.

Wednesday morning I stopped into Ralph’s on my way to work and saw that my favorite packaged noodle soup was selling for a quarter a package or five for a $1. That’s quite a price hike in a matter of months. Boxes of mac and cheese were selling for something like $1.25 each.

My conclusion?

Prices are on a rapid upswing. Our dollars don’t stretch as far as they did last year — or even last week.
Those old beer caps probably have an answer. I remember this one: a key followed by the letter P, an oar, a chin and an arrow pointing up, as in “keep your chin up.”

Yeah right.