The sugared nut financial indicator

I can tell when I’m feeling rich!

Every Saturday the downtown mall in our city holds an arts and crafts fair. In addition to the usual arts and crafts many other stalls set up shop and offer a variety of wares. Popular items in the ‘non-art’ area are olives and home squeezed olive oils, cheeses – usually delicious goat-milk cheeses, spice stalls, strawberries, mangoes and other exotic fruits, and nuts.

My regular Saturday morning chore is to buy the newspaper. I buy it only for the crossword it features, not the American kind one gets in the Herald Tribune, but an English cryptic crossword that I like doing. I have to weave through the throngs of shoppers and gazers from the foot of the escalator to the book store where the papers are sold. And therein lies a problem.

The nut counter

Halfway in this mad dash to get in buy the paper as quickly as possible is a large counter dealing in nuts. What’s the problem? The sugared nuts. They have a piece of equipment that looks rather like a concrete mixer and into this goes almonds, peanuts, pecans, cashews, sugar and water. Out come the most delicious sugared nuts. “Don’t you dare!” said my wife the first time this kiosk opened for business.

I was there on Saturday, as usual, fighting my way through the crowd when I spotted the nuts. I had come with money, a payment for an Instant Payday Loan article having arrived via cyberspace and my Paypal account sometime in the night. Normally I carry only money for the newspaper when I come to the mall. I bought a bowl of mixed sugared nuts. “Do you want an explanation of how to store these so that they last?” asked the storekeeper. He looked at me and laughed, “You mean they won’t even last as far as your apartment!”

The sugared nuts

The sugared nuts are delicious. What’s more one cannot stop eating them until the bowl is empty. The sugared nuts are also expensive, a small bowl costing about $6. We don’t usually buy them although the salad maker in the family likes to sprinkle them on a green salad – “makes it much more interesting”.

Lately I have been buying them when I have ‘spare’ money. I notice that the nuts have become a sort of indicator of our personal financial situation on Saturdays. If I am not feeling financially strapped, we buy and the buying acts as an on/off switch. Buy the nuts and everything’s fine. Things don’t feel so great – no nuts.

Economic indicators

Economic indicators are a subject all on their own and range from the ridiculous to the sophisticated. One of the best known is the Economist’s Big Mac index which tries to make the theory of exchange-rates easier to understand. It is based on McDonald’s Big Mac hamburger. The prices of the Big Mac in various countries are listed, converted into dollars, mixed with the earning power of the local currency, minced and spat out as a ‘purchasing power parity’, a direct comparison of currencies.

Interestingly, we always complain about how much the Big Mac costs here but according to the latest Big Mac table, what costs $3.54 in the U.S. costs $4.24 here. So much for the complicated hamburger standard.

My nut indicator is easier – either I’m feeling rich or I’m not!