Paying the Cost to Read

Ok, I'm going for it.
When I was a wee lad, my brothers left their collections of comics when they moved out (being 12 and 15 years older than me), so I was basically born addicted to comic books. When I had my appendix removed in kindergarten (or 1st Grade. Can't remember)my dad brought me comics he and my mom bought for me. I then started using my allowance to buy comics on my own, starting with GROO THE WANDERER #7 from Epic. The comics then were 75 cents. I'd get $5/wk for allowance and would buy at LEAST 3 comics a week. It was just before the industry hiked the price to $1. Well, what's a quarter, you know?
I walked into a comic shop recently and the printed price on most of the books I wanted to pick up (being a semi-regular collector, I'm behind on story arcs right now but I'm still a full-time comic geek), only to find the high-priced $2.99 had risen to the ABSURD $3.99!!! I used to buy ANNUALS for that much! 90-120 page books!! These are 30 page (including ads)monthly books, and SOME weekly or bi-weekly, whose print quality seems no different than the $2.99 days of old. I know that when prices went up a few years ago, the reasoning was because the quality of the paper being printed on was better and more expensive. I don't remember many comic fans complaining about the paper quality before, though. And the quality THEN is the same as NOW, but more expensive! If I want to buy, let's say, GREEN ARROW #2-3 off the shelf, it costs me $8. For 60 pages! And not even FULL story pages! Ads take up a few of those 60 pages! I have been picking up trades lately, but mainly because I live so far away from a comic shop that I can't get my monthly (ok, weekly) fix. Now, I have to wait for storylines to finish, then wait another couple months for the trade of said storylines to come out, then wait for the price to drop to a number I can afford. I also feel bad for the creators who bust their asses to get a monthly book out, only for the fans to have to wait to read what they did for months after the creators finished.
Ok, rant over.