Let’s just say that my lawnmower hit an immovable object and caused me an expenditure that wasn’t pleasant. I could tell you how it happened or who was responsible, but that isn’t important.
First, let me give you a little background. Our place has a few acres and when we moved there, we negotiated to buy the previous owner's riding lawnmower. (We moved from a small city plot where we only needed a push mower and the current owners were moving to a small city plot.) A couple of times that first year, I broke drive belts on the deck. That’s when I found out that most riding lawnmowers were engineered for nice flat city lots and not the varied elevation yard we had.
Fast forward 10 or so years and we bought a commercial-grade riding lawn mower. You actually stand on the deck to get into the seat. I was told and operated under the assumption that any small branch can be chopped up by running it over. This worked well until the immovable object got in the way.
The blade bent, and before I finished mowing, it had worked loose and then fell off. Knowing there were still a couple of months of mowing, I took it in to get the blade replaced.
I expected a labor charge of $150 an hour and a new blade of about $30, but what I didn’t expect was about $100 of miscellaneous parts. Like the old joke of the $500 screwdriver for the Air Force, one nut was $30.
“And Solomon gathered together chariots and horsemen. He had 1,400 chariots and 12,000 horsemen, whom he stationed in the chariot cities and with the king in Jerusalem. And the king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stone, and he made cedar as plentiful as the sycamore of the Shephelah. And Solomon’s import of horses was from Egypt and Kue, and the king’s traders received them from Kue at a price. A chariot could be imported from Egypt for 600 shekels of silver and a horse for 150, and so through the king’s traders they were exported to all the kings of the Hittites and the kings of Syria.” - 1 Kings 10:26-29 ESV
That’s when I started thinking about how inflation materializes in our day-to-day lives. When most of the nuts and bolts are made overseas (due to lower labor costs) and shipped to the U.S., influences like rising fuel costs, eventually filter their way down to the price of the object. Compound that with the tariff strategy our president is using and maybe it’s not as surprising that the specialty bolt I needed has doubled in price over the last five years or so.
Whenever we deal with cost increases, we intuitively want to find a bad guy to blame. The reality is that the cost of any product has a myriad of influences that determine the price and most of those influences impact many steps in getting the product to the point of purchase for you. I’d say, in most cases, there is no bad guy.
It doesn’t matter whether you are referring to the current or previous president and Congress; their policies impact some of those influences of price increases, but they don’t have complete control of the resulting inflation. We want to think of inflation and the economy as something we can control if we have the right decision-makers in charge, but the reality is their influence is limited.
The reality of my tale is that I expected a repair price to be mostly labor (since that was the expertise I needed) and I ended up with a higher price that was close to half labor and half parts. I’m going to have to adjust my mindset on expectations.
“Jesus looked up and saw the rich putting their gifts into the offering box, and he saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins. And he said, “Truly, I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty put in all she had to live on.” - Luke 21:1-4
