Venting — By Tommy Purser

The good wife and I went on what has become our annual Thanksgiving shopping spree at Wal-Mart over the weekend.
Wal-Mart …. the place with low prices. Prices so low that local, home-owned businesses cannot compete. Prices so low that, decades ago, one by one, locally owned stores shuttered their doors …. gave up. The owners had to look for other ways to make a living …. seek different occupations so they could make enough money to go shopping at Wal-Mart themselves. What an indignity.
When Wal-Mart first came to town, I looked over their merchandise and spotted a shirt I liked. I looked at the price tag and was surprised at how cheap it was.
The next day, I visited a locally owned men’s clothing store and spotted the exact same shirt hanging on a rack of clothes. I looked at the price tag. The cost was twice the cost of that same shirt I saw at Wal-Mart. TWICE. DOUBLE Walmart’s price.
I knew the owner of that locally owned store. He was, and still is, my friend. It hurt me to think that my friend had to compete with Wal-Mart. My friend was a good man … still is a good man. Born and raised in Hazlehurst. Inherited his store from his father. His father had inherited the store from his father, my friend’s grandfather.
A few short months later, my friend locked the doors of the business once owned by his grandfather and father for the final time. He left in search of another job.
But the fate of that once proud, locally owned business is not the point of this column.
The point of this column is the cost the good wife and I had to pay for that full shopping buggy of groceries we pushed to our car to unload.
It seems like only yesterday that the cost of a full-to-the-brim shopping cart of food items would cost us $200. The cost for that buggy of groceries we bought last weekend was more than twice as much — $450.
Four hundred and fifty dollars.
The soaring costs of groceries is only a part of the story here. Everything costs more … much more.
We recently received in the mail our 2025 tax bill. You, too, recently received your tax bill. Shocking, wasn’t it? Made you mad, didn’t it.?
Some of you picked up your phones and called to complain. You called someone here. In Hazlehurst. In Jeff Davis County.
Now, finally, I get to the point of this column — you called the wrong person.
Our local elected officials are not solely to blame for those high tax bills. Those local elected officials are facing the same dilemma that all of us face today when we venture out on a shopping trip to Wal-Mart. They, too, have to pay unreasonably high prices for whatever it is they must buy to provide us with the services we require from our local governments. They, too, are shocked at what they must pay for whatever our local governments need.
The sticker prices we must pay today for everything we need are unacceptable. Pointing our fingers of blame at each other here, locally, is a bit misguided.
Those fingers should be pointed elsewhere, perhaps toward Washington.
Or maybe, just maybe, pointed back at ourselves …. because we, the citizens of Jeff Davis County, helped elect those people in Washington.
I’m mad about the price I had to pay for a shopping cart full of groceries. I’m mad about my high property tax bill. And I’m still mad that my friend was run out of business.
And I’m mad that the internet — Facebook in particular — is making it so hard for me to keep the doors to my business open.
I can’t compete with Facebook, just like my friend, years ago, couldn’t compete with Wal-Mart.
There — that’s my vent.
Venting should make me feel better.
But it doesn’t.