The Next Dark Age
We're in it Now
The Price of Low Fat Chocolate Milk
On the average day, I drink a Milk Chug for breakfast. To be specific, a 16 ounce bottle of Dean’s Low Fat Chocolate Milk. All chocolatey goodness with the required protein and ridiculously convenient. I buy them from the sundry store in my building. Not cost-efficient, but hardly as bad as a Starbucks habit (which will come on in the winter).
Because it is an occupational hazard, I know the price of milk is rising, so I have been waiting for the retail cost of my daily milk chug to go up. Then the other day, when I grabbed a bottle from the store refrigerator, I noticed something off:
The bottle read 14 ounces of chocolate milk.
Now I knew about that kind of cheating on ice cream – same price, smaller container. But I had never seen it with milk before. Gallon, half-gallon, pint, half-pint. But 14 ounces?
Huh. Dennis, the proprietor of the store, said the price had been going up wholesale. He just hadn’t passed it on yet. And when I made the comment about ice cream, he said that lots of other products have been doing that – potato chips and cereal were the two he mentioned. Things that tend to go stale in my house, anyway.
So. Two fewer ounces of chocolate milk are hardly going to kill me. But attention must be paid!
The Next Dark Age 
This is more insidious than the price going up. I think I’d be hard pressed to notice the volume of things I buy like that.