If I had money to invest I wouldn't put it into stocks or gold. I'd buy coffee. The price of coffee never goes down.

Recently the price has got out of hand. My last grocery visit, I noticed the cost of the name brand coffee we usually purchase seemed to have shot up $2.00 in a week. If I hadn't been leaning on the shopping cart I would have fallen over.

What can I say? Put up the price of water if you want, or charge for air, but coffee....??!!

To save a few dollars (who am I kidding, to save a fortune during the year....) I bought a store brand. After all, Mary and I aren't coffee snobs. In fact we're not coffee connoisseurs. Actually, we don't even have good taste in coffee.

Okay. Let's admit it, we're caffeine addicts. But even a heroin addict might pause at the prospect of shooting up with a turkey baster.

The coffee is just a delivery system for the drug. How bad can the store brand be? As long as it's hot and bears some resemblance to what we're used to, who cares?

I admit I cared a little when I popped open the seal and didn't get that heady whiff of coffee. (Man, they ought to package that fresh tin of coffee smell so people could use it like snuff.) That's a transitory sensation though. The truth is in the brewing.

And the truth is that it's easy to tell the difference between ground coffee and sweepings from the coffee factory floor, or maybe from the hold of the ship that transported the coffee, or dried dirt from around the cargo bays where it was loaded into trucks. Maybe they scraped the soles of the shoes worn by the coffee bean harvesters or the hooves of those donkeys they always depict laden with bags of beans.

There had to be some real coffee in the stuff somewhere. If it had been nothing but artificial flavor the wonders of modern chemistry would have insured that it tasted at least a little bit like coffee.

Do I sound cranky? Well, consider what I'm drinking. Oh yes, we're going to finish off the whole infernal tin. No matter what it costs us! Even bad coffee ain't cheap these days.

UPDATE:

So this afternoon Mary alerts me to the following story:

Kraft Foods Inc. is lowering coffee prices in the United States by about 6 percent, one week after J.M. Smucker Co. announced a similar reduction.

Kraft said the price reduction covers its Maxwell House and Yuban brands.

Smucker's price cut, also about 6 percent, primarily affects its Dunkin' Donuts, Folgers and Folgers Gourmet Selections lines.

Prices for coffee beans have soared in recent years in part because of growing demand and harsh weather. Those rising prices, along with higher fuel and packaging costs, prompted companies such as Smucker, Kraft, Starbucks and Green Mountain Coffee Roasters to increase prices.

But prices for beans are starting to come down.

http://m.rocnow.com/business/article?a=2011110824008&f=1025