If you were listening yesterday, then you will know that my life is in limbo. What was supposed to be the final push and a move to the new house turned into more uncertainty. Because we are renting the new house, we certainly could have moved anyway however I made the call that we were not ready. Truth be told is that we were not.

A huge effort has been made, my shed, shop and garage are 100% ready. Most of the rooms that we live in are somewhere between zero and 75% ready. I am still selling things and 100% focused on getting ready. So, it is not all a bad thing that we didn’t just jump off of the cliff.

In my shed, there was a bucket. It was full of chain and garden stakes. This was all stuff left when we moved in or I picked up in the yard. I put the chain the bucket and it was shoved in the back of the shed. When it came to packing, I decided to take the steel over to the neighbors for scrap purposes. At the bottom of the bucket, but above all of this chain was these old advertisements.

One is a monthly mailer from a regional chain and the other is the weekly Sears advertisement from the Sunday paper. I had known that they were there there. It is one of those things that I saw once every couple of years. I don’t know why I never threw them out. I know that I have thought several times that they didn’t belong in the bucket, but I never did.

While packing, I finally got to the point that I was no longer going to store this trash. Before I threw it out, I decided that I would check the date for fun. The best that I can surmise is that this is from mid-September 2005. I know this because the coupon book below, the prices would run for a month. So, because it says that it is valid through October 9, it had to be September 6. They run their prices Tuesday through Monday.

I know what was happening in my life at that time. That was immediately following Labor Day. That particular Labor Day Sunday, we had returned from Hawaii because my brother had just gotten married. I picked up some kind of crud and I ended up spending three more days in bed following a week of vacation on Oahu and Maui. This was the beginning of life as I know it now. We had only lived in that house nine months and we had yet to learn that our first son would be delivered the following July.

I thought it would be interesting to see how time has changed. First of all, Sears no longer exists for all practical purposes. The one page that I thought would be illustrative was the electronics page. A 30″ ‘widescreen’ was $800 on sale! I have a slightly newer 32″ that I paid $12 for two years ago. New TVs of that size are $99 all day long, granted they are Toshiba but even those I see are going for $109 on Amazon.

The past was certainly the golden age of ammunition. I see that 12 gauge game loads are $3.29 a box. That very same load is $10.99 at Sportsman’s Warehouse. OK, that hurts but nowhere near the price of 38 special. I see that same box going for $35.99. If you are doing the math, that is over a four times price increase in twenty years. Things aren’t so bad if you are a 9mm shooter. The sale price of $5.99 is today $14.99.

That is comparing apples to apples, if I just want to compare cost, I can see CCI brass 9mm at $9.99 on sale. So that is less than double what it was. I will also admit that Sportsman’s Warehouse will never compete dollar for dollar against Bi-mart but it is a place that I can go locally and purchase the same brands and they have a website that I can reference prices. What is more lost in time is not the prices but what was on sale.

When is the last time you saw 25 Auto on sale? That is something I never paid any attention to in the first place. But what I will comment on is when was the last time I saw 38 special on sale. I have to say that it was probably pre-Obama 2012.

End Your Programming Routine: Times change, I get that. I still wish that there was a Sears and TVs were more than disposable item. Sure, image quality is better today but they certainly don’t function as well or last as long. If we are judging our society, the metric I would not pick is TV prices. A proliferation of TVs really has not helped our society become better. It has just helped us surrender to the tech giants. We have given our privacy, our data and with it a part of our souls.