The price of Clorox

We were driven to the airport in Houston by a guy named Abelardo. Nice guy, a little chatty, which initially seemed like a liability but our conversation was interesting.

Unsurprisingly, we talked about inflation. It seems like it's a problem that's on everybody's mind these days. What did surprise, however, was the data points he called out in support of it. "You used to be able to get Clorox for like $4 a gallon but now it's $9" he shared. He cited some similar point about Lysol. Aside from the fact that each of these dearly beloved household cleaning products had its moment in the headlines over the last couple of years, is either of those prices really meaningful or impactful? I mean, I can understand if people complain about the price of gasoline or bread, that's meaningful. But Clorox and Lysol? Sounded to me like he was listening to a little too much talk radio. But maybe he's just bored and resorts to that because he's driving around Houston trying to make a living. It's all good.

He was unaware that there was a new variant of COVID making the rounds.

He also shared with us what a bummer it was driving drunk people home late at night, how often they puke in his car. I get that. That's no fun at all. He also said that a problem he faced was people putting their unaccompanied kids in the car to go across town to their grandma's or whatever. About how he's afraid he's going to get scammed by somebody claiming child abuse or the like. Seems like there's a lot of scammers out there being consistently creative.

Though he was born in the US and was a citizen, he had spent a couple of decades back in Monterrey, Mexico, his family's hometown. He was glad to be back in the US because he said Mexico was a third-world country, incredibly corrupt because of the need to pay off the cartels, which had made his uncle's business impossible to run profitably. "Mexico is a third-world country," he told us several times.

In the end, I was happy to be a safe fare for him to the airport, easy and low-stress money.