For food cost references:
Rice-a-roni is about a dollar a package at the regular grocery store around my way; it’s about half to a third of that cost if you shop at discount grocers like Save-A-Lot. A single banana costs about .33 cents.
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“Mr. White”
I remember that:
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This entire project is also his payment to whoever owns the companies providing the materials and labor. I think he sees it as the way to protect his own kneecaps, because he’s not delivering what he promised to the people he owes.
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The lack of empathy displayed by conservatives was a big problem long before their poster boy was elected. It’s particularly startling to see and hear from the ones who call themselves Christians.
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I think a more productive (and instructive) question than “how much is a gallon of milk / a loaf of bread” would be “how much do you spend on food each week?” (And not, I hasten to emphasize, “how much does the average American spend on food each week?”), perhaps with a follow-up question of “what’s your meal plan for the week?” as a way to sanity-check their first response. Not everyone is going to have the specific minutia of their grocery expenses memorized, but they’ll definitely be able to ballpark how much goes out the door every time they go through the checkout line. I’d be willing to bet the average congressperson’s weekly grocery bill is several standard deviations away from the mean for the American public.
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Personally, I can’t leave the grocery store without having to spend at least $75 to $100, and that’s just the bare minimum for staple foods and essentials like toilet paper, toothpaste and feminine hygiene products.
I’d love to do a side-by-side comparison with what the average congress critter’s staff spends on the monthly grocery budget for that congress critter’s family…
Hell, I’d be happy to do it with the person in congress who makes the very least amount of money; 5 will get you 10 they still come out better than I do.
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The reason behind picking one product is simplicity. It’s also the reason it’s normally bread or milk and not apples, steak, chicken, or salad dressing. The goal is something that almost everyone buys, without having to qualify the answer at all. It’s the same reason a box of Rice a Roni is a poor choice to ask.
The every week one depends on how you shop
- Do you go to the store once a week?
- Do you go every day for just that day?
- Do you go once a month to a warehouse store and buy in bulk?
- Do you eat lots of protein or lots of grains or lots of dairy?
- How big is your family?
- Is it 1 kid in diapers, 2 teenage boys, none they’ve all moved out?
Trying to get an answer that seems simpler actually depends on lots and lots of different factors. Which also means anyone trying to compare the unknown factors used in the answer to the unknown factors for them personally, they’ll always be out of sync.
Go to the store enough, and you’ll roughly know the price of a gallon of milk. I do the shopping, and while my wife would have no idea or just a guess, I could be within 25% for our area easily enough. Shoppers would know that the store brand is cheaper than the name brand with a rough guess at the dollar amount. They’ll know that $7 for the organic grass fed cows milk is a high price, and also know that the days of $0.10 milk are long gone.
If all we need is milk. A quick trip to the store is at least $40 to get it. That doesn’t mean milk costs that much, just that it’s never all I come home with. 
It never matters what you go in for, once you grab a large cart, you’re spending $75+ filling it up. I’ve found it’s cheaper per month to go to the store when we need a lot of stuff at one time.
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That presumes that transportation is not an issue for your family. Personally, I don’t own a car, so I have to make every trip really count. When I did live walking distance from the local grocery store, it was cheaper to just buy supplies as I needed them.
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Very good point. One more thing that makes a single product question easier than something more rolled up.
(And my personal bias slipping through.)
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This was what I wanted to post in response. You did a better job than I would have.
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Did her family still own grocery shops then?
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I have no idea what a pint of milk costs, or not exactly, because I always buy four-pint bottles, and the cost varies according to where you buy it.
I guess it’s roughly 80p- £1.
I am not a politician, and, like most people these days, I do a monthly shop, where milk, like many other essentials, gets grabbed and dumped in the shopping trolley with scant regard paid to the damned price!
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Yeah, goes real well with a cup of burnt beans from Starbucks. To me they’re all grease and sugar, but I have a soft spot in my heart for Krispy Kreme ever since a car went into oncoming traffic to go around me on my bicycle (I was at or slightly above the speed limit) and got nailed by a police car who had been hanging around in the Krispy Kreme parking lot.
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Not literally. The days when you could actually fill up a grocery cart for $75 are long gone.
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I worked for years at grocery stores, including cashiering when we had to know the prices (before the store got scanners) and later stocking/pricing things. I don’t know the price of bread or milk either. I could guess, but that might be a few years out of date since my wife’s been doing the grocery shopping.
What really stands out as out of touch is the idea that you just load up a cart with groceries, wave at the proprietor on your way out and yell “Put it on my tab, Billy!” Not even knowing how shopping works in general is way more out of touch than not knowing a specific price.
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To tRump you never have to pay for anything until the government forces you.
That’s one reason why he’s working so hard to destroy the government.
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Milk may not be the best choice as the price of a liter varies considerably (in Europe, between about 80c and 1.5€). Bread is even worse as there are very different kinds. Some countries like France are also noticeably cheaper, because the price of bread used to be regulated not so long ago.
What people spend on food is also all over the place. More processed foods would quickly drive the price up.
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If you have a bread machine, it’s a tad more difficult to figure out. Pretty sure that It’s cheaper, though.
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