Pralines Are Still Two Dollars. I Did the Math.

the math. it does not work. it does not have to.

There is a praline stand in this basin that has charged two dollars a praline since 2017. The parish paper reports the price every few months, the way other papers report the price of gas, and every time it adds the same four words: and it will not.

I have been asked about this more than I have been asked about the cow. So I did the math.

Pecans: up. A reader who works an orchard sent me nine years of buying-station prices written on the back of a feed store calendar, and the line goes one direction. Sugar: up. Butter: do not ask me about butter. Evaporated milk: up, and the can got smaller, which a different reader would like me to look into separately.

By my figures, a praline that sold for two dollars in 2017 costs somewhere around two dollars and sixty cents to make today. Every praline at that stand is a sixty cent gift, and the paper says she sells them by the hundreds on a festival Sunday.

Now. I have said on this blog for nineteen years that it is always money. So who is paying the sixty cents?

DocFenwick says nobody is paying it. Doc says some people simply decide what a thing costs, and then it costs that, and the difference is something they choose to give, like a tithe. Doc says there is a word for this, and the word is grandmother.

Here is my read. I have been wrong about money exactly once, and it was this.

Buy the praline. Pay two dollars. Do not try to give her three. A reader tried in 2019 and is still not allowed back in line.

I relay. You decide.

In Truth and Terror.
— Beau