Reflections upon the Spice Trade.

Reflections upon an impromtu discount:

I had gone shopping, primarily to get some free coffee and my cart somehow accumulated this assortment of items as food products tend somehow to impulsively leap off the shelves and into my passing motorized cart, particularly when I am dieting. Since I have gone off all my meds I've taken up the "spice habit" and one of the items was a spice marked "clearance" that turned out to somehow lack a comparable bar-code entry when scanned at checkout time. The store was quite busy and the manager was even helping check out this curmodgeonly old geezer so there was no real desire to send someone to check the shelf price for the product. The manager instead said 'how about a dollar' and I replied 'sure, at my age I can never see the prices anyway'.
So in a matter of a few moments I obtained a $2.05 item for $1.00. Happy am I. A reflection of our modern lifestyle.

But reflect with me for a minute. Mens lives used to be consumed by the Spice Trade. Westerners were often enslaved, ransomed and re-enslaved in it. Wives in Western Cities often had to seek Begging Licenses because their husbands had been lost to the spice trade. Religious Orders made fortunes handling the details of the ransoms and dealing in the goods captured by travellers on the Silk Road.

A merchant in Alexandria might consign a shipment of Black Cumin under his seal as a Servant of Allah and Leader of the Enlightened, but the product surely did not originate in Egypt, it had already traveled half way across the known world on its trip to its ultimate destination in Medieval Spain or France. Lives had already been lost in its harvesting and transport. Fortunes were made and lost as it traveled.

Yet, here in present time sunny Florida, a busy supermarket manager was doling out a bottle of Cumin for a dollar simply because it was too much trouble to walk a few steps to check the proper shelf price.

Progress? Retrograde motion? Business Cycles? What great beast of commerce slouches toward Bethlehem to be born? Or should I perhaps say slouches toward Aleppo? Or perhaps toward Amazon's silicon valley?

No, Ain't Kicked Off Yet.

No. I ain't dead yet. Just haven't felt like posting much. Went off my meds in protest at Medicine in general. Stay tuned for more ....