After writing about The Grocery Game and Coupon Mom–and being impressed with some of the miniscule grocery bills their adherents claim to pay–I started wondering how much most people actually spend on grociers.  I wanted an idea of the average cost of groceries per person in the USA.

So, what’s the magic number?  I still don’t know.  I have a pretty good idea, though.

First, it was interesting to find that I wasn’t the only person wondering about this.  Yahoo and answers and other Q&A sites are littered with people asking the same thing.  Unfortunately, they rarely get answers. Well, they get answers, they just don’t get an answer to the question.  Respondents tend to state what they spend on groceries, which really doesn’t give us any idea of the average.

Still, the answers were fascinating–primarily because the range from low to high is pretty extreme.   While some college students are paying less than $200 per month for groceries, you can find a commenter at FreeMoneyFinance who spends $400 for herself over the same period of time.  The average cost of groceries per person certainly isn’t represented by either extreme.

You’d think it would be easy to get a more definitive statistic on how much we spend to keep the cupboards from being empty, considering how concerned people are about the issue.  I mean you have people making their own instant oatmeal packages to save a few cents and bloggers have often asked people how much they drop at the supermarket in hopes of developing an understanding of our eating habits.

Finally I tired of wading through anecdotal evidence culled from the very non-representative samples of Internet users interested in frugality.  I decided to look to Washington DC for an answer.  Surely the Department of Agriculture did a survey and figured this whol average grocery expenditure thing ut once and for all.

As it turns out, they didn’t.  But they came fairly close.  There are a few problems with the numbers, though.  First, they’re old.  The USDA released “Food Spending by American Households – 2003 and 2004” in 2007.  That’s right, by the time the document hit the press, it was already relatively old news.  Second, the USDA doesn’t supply information about the average person or average family.  Their information gathering was limited to urban families.

Those numbers are still interesting, though.  And they probably give us a pretty good idea of what the average person spends, although you should consider major economic shifts and 5 years worth of inflation when you look at the data.

So, what is the average cost of groceries per person, according to “Food Spendng by American Households…”?  $1,347.oo, or $112.25 per month.

As one’s household size increases, the per capita spending on food decreases.  The numbers are nearly the same for singles and 2-person households, but by the time you’re talking about six people or more under one roof, the expenditure drops to $937.

As you’d expect from a big gnarly government report (the tables alone constitute 90+ pages), Uncle Sam’s employees at the USDA break it all down by just about every demographic you can imagine.  They also told us how much folks spent on food away from the home (average:  $860 per year, per person in 2004).

So, there you have it.  A not-quite-definitive answer to a very popular question.  I know that the Lampsen household exceeds the average 2007 number, but not by much.  If I was willing to compromise on a few more things here and there, I think we could get slightly under the average line.

Are you blowing that number away or are you fairly close to the mark?  How much are you spending on grocers per month?

Last I had heard, Starbucks was scaling back its empire in response to the downturn in the economy, closing poor-performing stores and canceling the opening of new stores. Why then, do I still see their logo on every street corner?

I went to the local bookstore the other day hoping to find a good read for a quiet Sunday afternoon, and even then couldn’t escape the coffee giant. Their disposable cups with the cardboard sleeve were in the hands of every other customer sitting down browsing through their books while deciding which were intriguing enough to be worth going over the monthly book-buying budget.

I wondered how these avid readers could even afford a coffee addiction when they intend on buying a stack of books as high as three Venti Caramel Macchiatos. Starting at almost $4 for a fancy-named cup of milk and espresso, this one addiction that explains why half of America is broke.

However, as I sat down reading my own selections of “maybe I’ll buy this today,” I noticed several customers using a Starbuck’s gift card to pay for their two-gallons-of-gas worth of sugar and cream. I decided to look into it, thinking maybe there was some rewards program or other incentive that was keeping customers’ addiction to caffeine a priority above their addiction to money.

Apparently, from what I gathered, eBay is good for more than baseball cards and used books. Why I wasn’t browsing their site for my reading material that day has more to do with the time frame between seeing something I want and actually receiving it, rather than the quality of goods I find at auction.

So anyway, when doing a little research into why consumers prefer to pay with these plastic cards, I found a link to a Starbuck’s gift card on eBay for $29.99. Now right off the bat I’m thinking that $30 won’t get a Frappuccino addict further than a week’s worth of highs. I’m feeling a little sorry for the sucker who needs his coffee enough to buy an auctioned off fix. Then I read the fine print.

The card, at $29.99 plus free shipping–and no sales tax because it’s being offered in one of those states where the government hasn’t stepped in yet–is actually valued at almost $40. Thirty-eight dollars and seventy-one cents, to be exact. For those of you math challenged folks out there, that means on eBay you can buy a Starbuck’s gift card for only 77% of the face value.

A savings of 23% on a legal drug isn’t bad, I decided. Not bad at all and in fact quite good. Unfortunately for those of you switching over to eBay right now hoping to scoop up a few of these good deals, most auctions don’t offer these high of savings. I’d say the average is between 5-15%, though if you are one who knows where every Starbuck’s is located between your front door and your grandmother’s house in Minnesota–you are looking to save a good chunk of change with even a 5% savings each year.

With the average Venti “anything” costing about $4.55 plus tax, considering the average consumption of 6 per week–that’s about $1550 worth of frilly caramel and milk per year. A mere 5% savings would save your typical addict over $75/year, but a generous 15% would save more than $150. Consider the savings if every Starbuck’s gift card you found was offered 77% of face value. It’s enough to pay for a year at the gym where you can work off your high calorie addiction–or more than $350 to be more specific.

Bernie Madoff may have pulled off the biggest of all Ponzi schemes in recorded history, but it’s not like he came up with the idea.  That honor belongs to Charles Ponzi, right?

Wrong.

We had Ponzi schemes before we had Ponzi.

Charles Ponzi reigns as the namesake for pyramid schemes these days, but he didn’t invent them.  They’ve been around for quite some time and it’s not hard to imagine that they predate Peter and Paul (as in “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, which was the expression generally utilized for such acts of malfeasance before Ponzi did his thin).

Take for instance, Ms. Sarah Howe.  She was pulling a Ponzi in 1880, long before Charlie P. figured out how to bilk people out of their money.  Howe as actually a double-dipper.  She wasn’t just doing the pyramid, she was going it by going after people who’d tend to trust her the most at the time–other women.  That makes Howe a Ponzi-ist and an affinity scammer (sort of like Bernie Madoff).  Apparently, she set up a women-only program, promising an 8% return on everybody’s cash.

The only way that could happen, though, is if she kept getting more women to dump money into the scheme. Obviously, her luck ran out.  There’s not a lot of information online about Howe, but the Wikipedia entry that mentions her pre-Ponzi scheme references a book that might be of interest to those who’d like to learn more about her–and Mr. Ponzi.

She wasn’t the only person “robbing Peter to pay Paul” to beat Pozi to the punch, though.

Nineteen years after Howe, but still 21 years prior to Ponzi in 1899, a guy working for a little tea company near Wall Street came up with a plan.  William F. Miller started telling people, including his bible students, that he could produce a 10% per week return on their investments because he had picked up some golden information by being so close to Wall Street.

He grabbed the cash with both hands while he could, keeping the deal afloat by paying old investors with the money from the new ones.  When it was all said and done, he was sentenced to prison.  He didn’t get his sentence as a rich man, though.  In one of those great ironies, Miller was cheated out of his money by a couple of con artists who were apparently better at playing the grift than Mr. “520%” Miller.

He ended up skirting most of his sentence, receiving a commutation from the Governor.  Apparently, that decision was less about mercy than it was about convincng t Miller to testify against other bad guys.

The interesting thing about these pre-Ponzi schemes is that they bear such a striking resemblance to Bernie Madoff’s swindle.  The names and the centuries change, but the song remains the same.

Give me your money.  I’ll invest it and give you a great return.  In reality, I’ll use your money to pay off the other people I’ve suckered.  You’ll get your money after I find a new mark or two. Eventually, someone figures it out and it all goes down the tubes.

It’s amazing how history repeats itself, isn’t it?  You can draw a pretty straight line through the gutter to connect Sarah Howe, W.F. Miller, Bernie Madoff and a slew of people who who plied their dastardly trade during the intervening years–including the guy who had this great investment opportunity involving postal coupons, the one and only Charles Ponzi.

This is what I hear on a daily basis:

Americans are bobbing in a pool of debt so deep that it’s tickling their earlobes.

If we don’t get a handle on the total U.S. consumer debt, we’re doomed.

Those aren’t tough messages to understand.  Too much debt is bad.  We have too much debt.  We need to start acting like responsible adults by paying it all down.  It’s time to embrace the concepts of savings and delayed gratification.

Well, maybe.

A lot of folks will say that the total U.S. consumer debt level, which is around $2.56 trillion, needs to go down.  Not everyone sees it that way, though.

There’s another school of thought, and I hear from its professors on a daily basis, too.

They argue that we don’t have a debt crisis and that consumer spending is the only thing driving our economy.  If we want to get out of this recession, they’ll argue, we need people to buy more stuff on credit.

There’s some support for that perspective, too.  A recent article I found via the Houston Chronicle.  It’s author, Erik Tyson, maintains that we don’t really have a big problem with credit and that things seem to be cruising right along just fine and dandy in that department.

“The recession has supposedly led to increases in family savings, major efforts by families to reduce debt and other belt-tightening measures, so the figures given in the Fed consumer-finance survey probably even exaggerate the extent of the current credit problem,” Vlasenko said.

In summary, Vlasenko says: “As is often the case, the reality is often less extreme and dire than we are led to believe. Sure, some families and individuals are drowning in credit card debt. And some misuse their credit cards.

“But the vast majority of Americans appear to manage their credit wisely.”

Now, it’s not so hard to get a grip on the pro-debt mode of thinking, either.  We don’t have the production and manufacturing base in this country that we once did, so our spending is critical to business success.  This is the same logic that’s led to things like the clunker law–encouraing people to take on debt in order to save the auto industry.

You can pick either of those perspectives and come up with at least a few decent arguments for yourself.  The problem with all of this is that they don’t seem to fit together too well.  You can’t simultaneously encourage thrift and debt reduction while salivating over the prospect of people spending more money.

Now that big picture stuff is a little complicated (and very mutually exclusive, it would appear), but the “on the ground” happenings are just as confusing.

Some people seem pretty happy that we’re putting a dent in the total U.S. consumer debt total.  This recession has led to some belt-tightening and some serious debt reduction, you see.  Apparently, we’re paying down billions and billions in consumer debt every month for the past half year.

If you’re in the “debt bad” group, that’s good news.  Or is it?

You see, a lot of that debt reduction seems to be coming from write-offs and settlements.  The lending banks realize they can’t squeeze green blood from the turnips suffering through this recession, so they’re taking the bad debt off the books.  We’re not really paying down all of the debt.  Some of the reduction is stemming from our simple inability to repay it.

That, as you’d guess, has a nasty impact on credit scores.  Thus, people aren’t getting as much credit.  Less credit extension means it’s harder to boost that total debt number.  Maybe we’re “paying it down” only because we’re not getting more of it.

And that’s scary news if you’re part of the “we need more consumer spending” crowd.  It’s hard to imagine consumers buying their way out of a recession when they can’t pay their bills and no one’s interested in giving them more access to credit.  Banks are slashing credit lines.

Personally, I’m still trying to make sense of it all.  At the risk of not doing my part to help the economy, however, I’m approaching my own life on the basis of what’s best for me.  I love the fine folks at GM, but I’m not buying a new car.  I’m sure that the people running those businesses in the shopping mall are real sweethearts and I know that they can’t employee people if we’re not in there sliding plastic so fast it melts, but I’m opting out.  The Lampsen plan involves reasonable spending, working with cash, and taking care of the future.

If I’m accidentally contributing to a long-term recession, I apologize.  Part of me wonders, though.  If the only way out of this mess is to either bottom out or to get even messier, maybe it’s just time to bottom out.