Last Friday I began my day with breakfast at the Amish diner at the Reading Terminal Market. I ordered my usual morning meal: scrapple, home fries, scrambled eggs and 1 slice of whole wheat toast. The portions were generous and the service prompt and cordial as you might expect. But to my surprise the tab was about twice what I normally pay back in the 'burbs and triple what it costs me out at the breakfast stand at Ephrata's Green Dragon Farmers' Market on a Friday.
So leaving with a mild sense of sticker shock, I went through the RTM to examine other prices. I came away with the feeling that bargains there are few and far between. At a produce stand a pint of cherry tomatoes was a rather expensive $2.99 and bananas were an astronomical 69 cents a pound, a far cry from the 35 cents a pound I normally pay at the Green Dragon. There were no bargains from the fish mongers either. Salmon was around $15/lb and the farm raised tilapia was over $5. Likewise the shrimp and shellfish were also too dear for my wallet. And the question lingering in my mind was how long they have been sitting on a bed of ice waiting to be sold. Poultry was also pretty steep, too. It was difficult to find the ingredients for a reasonable home cooked meal.
But the final insult was at the "Pennsylvania Store." A jar of Kauffman's apple butter that I have purchased at the Shady Maple Market for $3.95 was a whopping $9.95! So it wonders me, as my Pennsylvania German brethren would say, why things are so expensive. Could it be the transportation cost, or the rental fees for the stalls there? Or is it just another tourist trap seeking to validate the vintage line from P. T. Barnum, that "There's a sucker born every minute"?
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