Cost of Living

How much do you pay for a loaf of bread? A gallon of milk?

We knew when we chose BYU-Hawaii over the U of Alabama several months ago that the cost of living was considerably different. We knew there was a reason why the difference in salaries was so huge. But we came here anyways.

Yesterday we spent the day "in town" (this is what they say over here when they're describing the other, more populated, side of the island) doing our weekly shopping. We bought a vacuum, went to dinner at a place that I would take YOU to, if you ever come to visit, fueled up our car and went grocery shopping. I was so excited when pulled into a gas station that actually had gas for under $3! Ok, so it was $2.99. We were so happy to see that gas had come down so much from when we first arrived! (In August it was like $4.20 something.) But then my dad told me that gas around the Salt Lake area is down to $2.25 and $2.30! What the heck!

Then we went to Safeway for some groceries. I hate it when you get to the check-out-line and have to pay! And it's even worse in Hawaii. For example, green bell peppers were $1.25/lb, cheap Safeway-brand white bread was $3.89, and a gallon of milk is always like$9/gal. It all adds up!

Here's the catch though: All Hawaiian grocery stores offer a frequent shopper card to punish the tourist and reward the resident, I think. So that means we have a Safeway Club Card and a Foodland Maka'i Card (oh yeah and there's only like 2 kinds of grocery stores on the island) and they give us all sorts of great deals on their already hiked up prices. Take last night for example...our bread only cost us $3.59 and those green bell peppers, well, they didn't have a special deal. And the other day when we ran low on milk, instead of paying the regular $9/gal, it only cost us $7 with our Maka'i Card!

There are some other alternatives. There's 3 Walmarts in town but none of the them really carry grocery items. They all have a small section where you can buy cans of soup, jelly, frozen pizza and the like. Those prices aren't too bad, but they just don't have everything we need. Sometimes if we're over there, we'll get what we need, but it's not worth going out of our way. We also have a Costco membership that we use now and then. But let's be honest, there's only 2 of us, we really don't want a year's supply of spaghetti noodles and Frosted Mini Wheats. They get old pretty quickly...just ask Dave!

At work, I'm often reminded by my coworkers that my predecessor up and left in the middle of her contract because she and her family couldn't make ends meet. Besides wondering if they're trying to tell me something, I'm actually not at all worried about that happening to us. We're careful with how much buy and how frequently we shop. We definitely have all that we need and then some. We both feel lucky to have the jobs that we have--I love mine and wouldn't want to work as anything else and Dave tolerates his, is happy to have it now, but even happier that it's not permanent.

And maybe when we move back to the mainland, inflation will make all prices there what they already are here and it won't be that big of a deal!