No kidding! I'm surprised the prices weren't hiked yet. :rolleyes:

I didn't know that about pepper, either. Fascinating!

Wow that's so interesting about the prices of salt through the ages and how it is made! Is Sea Salt made the more traditional way and is that why it's more $$?

Yeah, Sea Salt used to come from collecting sea water and drying it in huge reflectors, which took a long time and a lot of reflectors. It was the original preservative for food, and was hard to produce so supply and demand kept the price up. I'm sure that these days it's produced by boiling the water off using oil, or natural gas as a heat source. It takes a long time to boil off a pot of water, so the cost is probably relative to how much the fuel costs, since sea water is free.

Which leads me to think that when I buy a loaf of bread for a dollar fifty at the grocery store, I'm probably paying $1.25 for the fuel and driver, $0.10 for the bag, and $0.15 for the bread. Basically, the bread is free. Could that be? If so, and thinking strangely, it would mean the a bakery is really nothing more than a delivery service that creates the products to deliver.

I stopped at a Tractor Supply Store yesterday, and a gal there said she had 1,200 prices to increase ... so it's coming