Category: Economy

the price of shaving

whbeebe4 Comments

It’s been a while since I bought a can of shaving cream, sometime in 2018 as a matter of fact. Funny thing is I remember when I bought the last can, it came with that “NEW!” tag because the can bottom was aluminum instead of less expensive steel, and thus wouldn’t rust out in the shower. The can I had before that had rusted out. Today when I went in to get my new can of Barbasol it was smaller by three ounces, but it was the same price interestingly enough. Last year’s can was all of 10 ounces, while today’s was down to 7 ounces.

The reason I don’t buy shaving cream that often is I switch back and forth between electric and razor, tending to use the electric during the week so I don’t spend a lot of time getting ready before I drive into work. Weekends can be more luxurious time-wise, especially when it comes to a nice blade shave. And there are days when I don’t shave at all, thus extending the overall time when I want to get a shave with my razor.

This reminds me of all the other price increases I’ve seen over time, especially with orange juice. There was a time when orange juice came in 64 ounce cartons, until one day they showed up in 57 ounce cartons, but the price was still the same. I continued to buy it for a while until the price increase to over $4 a container, and that was many years ago. Of course both my doctor and dietician where quite happy when that happened, as today’s orange juice is full of sugar, even more so than a soft drink.

This makes me wonder if I should bite the bullet and invest in one more good electric razor, and just forego shaving with a razor all together. It’s not just the shaving cream but he expense of razors as well as the mess of fixing a sink of hot water and a mess to clean up when done.

All this angst over a decent close shave.

 

construction triptych 

whbeebe

I’ve been wanting to stop and photograph some of the on-going construction of Universal’s Volcano Bay before construction is finished and everything is buttoned down. I decided to run these series of photos with the Olympus E-M10 and the 14-140 Mark II. I moved the color JPEGs from the E-M10 to my iPad Pro 9.7″ and post processed them with Snapseed. I them moved them up to my blog with the WordPress app. Unfortunately I once again had to go into the browser-based WordPress editor to finish this entry. I’m pretty much done trying to edit with WordPress on either iPhone or iPad. Now it’s time to move on to some other tool.

This is the water park meant to open next year and to replace the old Wet ‘n Wild water park directly across Univeral at I-4. I have no idea how much more work needs to be done or if it’ll open 1 June 2017 as promised. The last time Universal tried to open a park on 1 June, it was Universal itself in 1990, and it didn’t go well. I was one of thousands of contractors trying to get it open and operational. I was a contractor with a company named Kinetix (long since gone) and I worked on Jaws, Quake, and E.T. Starting November 1989 I started working 12 hour days, six days/week, until March of 1990, and then we went to seven day weeks. On the afternoon of 31 May I walked into the park and worked a solid 34 hours until I left the morning of 2 June. It took almost a month for me to get back down to a normal work schedule. I’ve not worked a schedule that long and that intense since.

I’m curious to see what will transpire over the summer.