I Know Americans Are Hurting — I See It At The Greenmarket

AM New York reminds everyone that higher gas prices affect you no matter how much you use the subway:

With crude oil trading at about $70 barrel and gas going for more than $3 a gallon, the cost of food and other basic goods will probably go up, too. Oil prices affect everything from shampoo and your rent to diapers and air fares.

“We all go to the grocery store, and the tomatoes and cucumbers have to be trucked in somehow,” said Mike Davis, an economics and finance professor at Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University. “It’s useful to think of plastics and pharmaceutical goods too. Even though the material costs are a relatively small proportion of the total costs, an awful lot of things you see are petroleum-based, from paints to plastics. You can go on with these lists forever.”

Morse Pitts, a Montgomery, N.Y., farmer who sells salad greens at the Union Square Greenmarket, said rising oil prices have affected all of his operations.

“Everything costs us more; our seed costs us more, the machinery that we use runs on gas and the plastic containers we use are more because of the petro-chemicals used to make them,” Pitts said.

Pitts used to charge $5.50 a quarter-pound for a container of small greens, but beginning Wednesday he had to charge $6 so he could keep the price of large greens the same.