Food is all over the place these days as long as that place is "up". We just stopped going to Taco Bell all together. It's kind of crazy. I can't find a reaso

Food is all over the place these days as long as that place is "up". We just stopped going to Taco Bell all together. It's kind of crazy. I can't find a reason to go there any longer. As a kid, they were so cheap[0], the running joke was that $20 worth of food there would kill a person. It was about properly priced -- despite being a fan of Taco Bell, their consistency between restaurants (better, today) was terrible in the 90s -- you'd get anywhere from 1/4-3/4 filled shells with random mixes of cheese-lettuce-GroundMeat ratio. I took my kids there last weekend ... it was over $30.00 and I didn't eat. Fast food -- across the board -- has gone up. In my area, and I suspect most places, it's because they need to pay upwards of $18.00/hr to employ enough people to keep the store (and now restaurant) open. I expect a lot of automation is coming (and I hope like hell McDonald's fixes their terrible in-store ordering kiosk ... and that's one place where it's becoming increasingly expensive to avoid their app). My grocery bill went from ~$100/trip to $250/trip if I don't do the majority of my shopping at ALDI. So I basically stopped grocery shopping anywhere other than ALDI[1] for anything ALDI carries. I only avoided it, before, because I have 4 options within 2 miles and ALDI is 6 miles away (I love ALDI). I've started buying a lot of "the maintenance things[2]" at the dollar store (now $1.25, and the independent ones are now $1.00 - $5.00). You have to be careful with those because some items are a terrible deal there and some of the products are fscked up[3] but we've gotten lucky with a few trips -- consider that a 32oz bottle of the same shampoo was almost $8 at the other places and after purchasing a "test bottle" we bought out the rest and two other local stores in the chain. We do that when we find a good one and end up with enough to not have to think about it for a decade. The saving grace, I guess, is that I haven't had a commute in two years and won't be getting having, again. I also replaced much of the rest of my driving with a OneWheel. I'm filling up my gas tank less than once a month when I was filling up more than once a week, before. [0] At one point they were running $0.49 tacos -- mid-90s. [1] While everything went up there, too, it went up less ... although the frozen pizzas that are a guilty pleasure of mine still land around $2.39 (they never go on sale for $1.99 any longer, though). [2] Shampoo/Conditioner/Soap/etc, things like Band-Aids/Toothbrushes (they carry fancy manual toothbrushes which my kids use) [3] I've gotten Shampoo from a well known brand that I've purchased at a grocery store which was "separated". I guess I could have called the 800 number; guessing it was counterfeit/meant for destruction and ended up back in the gray-market.