this budding mind

I have a few minutes before episode one of Flight of the Conchords downloads so I thought I'd say hello. I've been thinking of a couple of different posts and thought I'd start with this one: My First Socialist Thought.

It started a few weeks back when I was as the grocery store buying ingredients for a lasagna. I gathered everything I needed from the various isles in my arms and headed for the checkout. I was met by a moment of embarrassment and despair when I stood staring blanking at the pin pad. As an attempt to earn credit cards points I hadn't used my pin for weeks and it had been replaced in my brain with the handful of codes I had to learn for work. I left my groceries on the belt, promising to come back from them. And then I ran. Across the street was a Fred Meyer. They wouldn't ask me for a pin that had been lost in the recesses of my mind. Take that Winco. And by the end of the shopping experience I was hopeful that I hadn't paid much more by crossing the street. The pricing was more equal that I had thought. But thinking back I did pay about three or four dollars more for the same ingredients.

Moving on, about a week or so ago Jon and I were driving to get some Sunday afternoon bbq, which is inconsequential to this story. As I sat in the passenger seat I thought about how a bag of chocolate chips costs more at one store than at another. It didn't seem fair to have a disparity in pricing if the product was the same, and not generic versus real stuff. I mean the same exact thing. How can stores get away with selling things for more? So I asked Jon, why can stores charge a higher price for the same product? Shouldn't there be a rule that all prices are the same, no matter where you go?

He knew where I was going with this thought better than I did. You mean, the government should regulate the cost of prices, he asked. And I thought that made sense. That's socialism, Lynette, he said. And though I had always been taught that capitalism was in line with everything fair and good, I came across a socialist thought that made more sense. And no one even tried to convince me or inform me on socialism. I just thought in this case it made more sense.