Dollar Coins and Grocery Shopping

Not really a connection, just two observations I had for today:

- Today really impressed upon me how much of a difference brand identification makes when you go to the grocery store. Today, instead of getting all my groceries at Giant Eagle like I normally do, I went to Aldi to buy some. If they are not in your area, Aldi is a discount grocery store-it's set up on the inside much like a warehouse, with boxes of items in rows lining the aisles, instead of your normal grocery store, where the items are arranged on shelves. Also, you bag your own groceries-you can buy bags at the store for a nickel apiece, or you can bring your own bags or take any empty boxes that are laying around.

It's different than the normal grocery store, but nearly everything is much cheaper than you would find it at Giant Eagle, Kroger or any of the "traditional" grocery stores in your neighborhood. The food you buy is a "generic" brand, like "Toasted Corn" instead of "Kellogg's Corn Flakes" for example, but so far, everything I have bought has tasted the same, and cost about half as much. The best deal I got today was on cereal-I bought the generic corn flakes at Aldi, and paid less than half as much as a box of Kellogg's cereal from Giant Eagle. Cereal is definitely overpriced, and I, for one, am tired of overpaying for it.

And you have to ask yourself-why are you paying $4.00 a box for cereal (and some of the "health" cereals like Product 19 are even more than that)? The answer: packaging. You're paying an extra two bucks, the price of a cup of coffee or an hour of parking at the Statehouse, so that you can have Tony the Tiger, or Captain Crunch, or whichever cartoon character you want staring back at you when you open the cupboard in the morning. Then when you go to pour the cereal into the bowl, and eat it, you get the exact same thing. Really, what else matters besides taste, price, and nutrition? This just shows how susceptible we all are to brand identification. Granted, not all generic products are the same as their brand-name counterparts, but many of them are. We just don't give them a try because we have been socialized to drink Pepsi, eat Kellogg's and General Mills cereal, wash our clothes with Tide, and get our morning coffee from Folger's or Maxwell House.

- Being the avid follower of presidential history and trivia that I am, I was excited to hear about the new dollar coins being issued by the U.S. Mint depicting each of the presidents, starting with George Washington. They just came out this past month, but many of the coins (by U.S. Mint estimates, about 50,000) have been found to be missing the words "In God We Trust" that were supposed to be printed on the rim. This has led to accusations that the motto was intentionally omitted, supposedly as a way of conditioning Americans to becoming accustomed to using money with the motto removed. Here's the story.

I think it was an honest mistake. If they had left off "In God We Trust" and nothing else, I would be inclined to think that it may not have been accidental, or that maybe Michael Newdow had found a new government job. But what was left off was the entire inscription on the edge, which, in addition to "In God We Trust," includes "E Pluribus Unum" and the date. And since it only happened to a relatively small number of coins, 50,000 out of 300 million struck, and at the beginning of the process in which they are being issued, this seems to go against the idea that there is some kind of conspiracy afoot.

Besides, if the idea was to get the public accustomed to "godless" money, why use dollar coins? Most people don't use them on a daily basis, case in point being the Sacajawea dollars that came out a few years ago. I just hope that this doesn't discourage the U.S. Mint from producing new coins-I am still collecting the state quarters, and I am planning to collect the new dollar coins too. I will be lucky to get one of the "error" coins, though.