9 ms·

I’ve seen some people showing actual price increases they’ve seen in their local communities. For a lot of folks it’s much higher than is being reported. Her

I’ve seen some people showing actual price increases they’ve seen in their local communities. For a lot of folks it’s much higher than is being reported. Here’s one from a person in Seattle: https://preview.redd.it/max54wqv9kb91.png?width=1112&format=png&auto=webp&s=bde6b9317519c97c68900c41ad8e8bde475d3d27 https://preview.redd.it/max54wqv9kb91.png?width=1112&format=...

noirbot 4y ago
I'm always curious for some of these how much it's just a problem of round numbers. Something like the vet visit, I totally believe, but marking down the $1 increase in airport parking cost feels like it's less a percentage and more that they just added 1 to the number because making it cost 36 cents more would just be awkward. Not that that doesn't cause a problem for the people paying it, but pricing for relatively cheap items is a coarse instrument. If you're a business owner and you have no idea how long inflation will be this high, you maybe just err on the side of pricing in some future price increases now and raising prices more in one go vs. changing them every couple weeks. Most consumer goods aren't like gas where people just expect the price to go up and down constantly day to day.
gruez 4y ago
That seems massively susceptible to sampling bias. eg. are you really reporting all of your costs, or only the costs that you noticed going up? Meanwhile BLS provides regional CPI numbers[1], which puts "Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA" inflation at 10.1% between Jun 2021 and Jun 2022. https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/factsheet/consumer-price-index-data-tables.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/factsheet/consumer-price-in...
- tyingq 4y ago
  The CPI is well thought out, though it's possible that their choices on weighting don't match your own spend. Some detail here: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2021.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2021.htm
  - imtringued 4y ago
    People don't seem to grasp that 9% inflation is extremely high across an economy as large as the US. The 70s had 15% inflation, everyone with their rage boner demanding 50% inflation in the CPI wants ridiculous reports of hyperinflation.
    - tyingq 4y ago
      Well, and 9% YoY, where the previous year was also up ~7% from its own previous year. The magic of compound interest and all.
      - Enginerrrd 4y ago
        Yes! And a lot of people forget that, but I calculated it and the average spending increases I've been seeing in my household are up more like 15% YOY over the last 2 years. And that coincides with a significant reduction in consumption on our part as well as substitution for cheaper goods over that same period.
  - themaninthedark 4y ago
    If the CPI does not match people's spending habits, then it does not matter if it well thought out or not because it is a bad metric. Looking at the table, Energy(CPI-U 7.348%,CPI-W 9.029%) looks to be massively undervalued. Everything in our modern life, from food and clean water to our leisure activities require energy.
- lend000 4y ago
  CPI has been engineered to meet targets for a long time. Several major flaws with CPI: Hedonic adjustments are more or less at the mercy of the bureaucrats. For example, new vehicles did not go up in hedonic-adjusted price from 1997 to 2020 according to the BLS [0]. The justification is that new cars have bluetooth and other features that counter-act the price change. An automatic Toyota Corolla was $12373 brand new in 1997. It was $19700 in 2020. Our inflation numbers over those years did not incorporate a price increase AT ALL, so it's a fair assessment that real inflation was higher based on that alone. The Big Mac index has probably always been the most accurate assessment, free of political pressures. And the most fundamental problem: the survey evaluates the median spending of a sample of Americans, but the median American spends pretty much all of their money. So you end up with the dotted line in this chart: [1]. Spoiler, it's pretty much a flat line. Real median wages don't move because CPI is calculated by measuring median wages. If prices rise, people can't <consistently> spend more than all of their money, so they buy cheaper things and buy less of them, and this changes the weights and reduces the inflation numbers. The fact that some economists with PhD's think this makes sense is why you should always do your due diligence instead of accepting a doctor's diagnosis blindly. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01 [1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekly-earnings-over-time-total-men-women.htm# https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekl...
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    I agree in general about the hedonic adjustments and their potential for manipulation or miscalculation. But automobiles are probably the worst example! Toyota didn't even roll out passenger side airbags until 1998. Only the driver had them prior to this. The new Corolla has 8 airbags. Today we have better fuel efficiency, collision protection, driver assistance, remote start... Even the seats are more comfortable. Not to mention most car brands have much better warranties today than they did in the '90s. Other things get hedonic adjustments but shouldn't. Shirts for instance.
    - lend000 4y ago
      But it's irrelevant when that's the cheapest new vehicle, most working Americans need a car, and despite better fuel efficiency, it isn't really that much cheaper to own a car. Hedonic adjustments make sense in theory, but in practice it's a loophole to make inflation whatever the government wants it to be. In the case of vehicles, they clearly went overboard. The counterargument to hedonic adjustments is that almost everything should become cheaper over time, including all vehicle parts and assembly, due to technological progress in manufacturing. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume hedonic adjustments should cancel out increases in manufacturing technology and just ignore them both, probably resulting in a simpler AND more accurate CPI.
chomp 4y ago
I'm super skeptical of posts like this because they seem cherry picked, or at best, have local price increases that aren't reflected elsewhere in the country. Half of those are restaurants, who have had challenges for the past 2 years outside of inflation. Gas has its own challenges, a head of lettuce at my local grocer is $1.52 which is cheaper than that person's 2021 price. Notably not included in that post is things like pork, which has fell in half since 2 years ago, and beef has had 4 straight months of decreases. Car prices are also down too from their peak. My point isn't that inflation doesn't exist. It's a very difficult number to compute. My point is that people on the internet aren't good at picking unbiased points to base their data on. Data like this is good to understand how the cost of living is increasing in certain segments, but we all need to remember (I make this mistake sometimes too) that an increase in the cost of living is not inflation.
- oldjavacoder 4y ago
  "My point isn't that inflation doesn't exist." My wife tells me different, so I'm going with her real world experience in the matter.
  - chomp 4y ago
    If you or your wife look at the past and current price of lettuce in the local store and then use that to make the conclusion that the purchasing power of the US Dollar has decreased 47%, then I don't know what to tell you. Your cost of living may have increased, but I do not understand how you can conclude an increase in inflation from living your daily life.
    - leereeves 4y ago
      I know that my total grocery bill (not just lettuce) has more than doubled in the past few years. Gas too. "The purchasing power of the US Dollar has decreased 47%" sounds about right.
      - imtringued 4y ago
SoftTalker 4y ago
Last year I could buy a whole chicken for roasting for about $10. Now they are $17 or so. 70% increase. Beef the same. Pork hasn't jumped as much for some reason. Ground turkey is about the most affordable meat I can find right now, but when you cook it you can see that it has a lot of water in it.
- gimmeThaBeet 4y ago
  This is where I'm always curious to see what other dynamics are going on in other places, I don't know how else to say it except that has absolutely not been my experience. In live in just normal midwest suburbia, so if there's places living with that, I should really count my blessings I don't. With a lot of these things nowadays, I've been looking at my receipt data and rooting through FRED, and obv the absolute numbers are probably not going to be bang-on, but the percentages are definitely pretty similar. So yeah, it's not fantastic, but FRED data for chicken, beef, sirloin is like 20%, 26%, 51% in two years, which agrees pretty well with what little data I personally have, or their estimate is a fair bit higher for the sirloin (also prob hard to estimate since I wouldn't treat it like as much a commodity as ground beef). Milk is a similar story, FRED has like 40% in two years, knock on wood I don't think I've observed that, but dairy might be a midwest speciality for these purposes. whole chicken, beef, sirloin. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000706111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000706111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0400703613 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0400703613
- mellavora 4y ago
  Avian flu resulted in mass culls. Feed prices also higher due to Ukraine/grain shortages increasing demand for grain. The very real price increases you are seeing are driven in part by very specific and focused economic shocks which exceed the baseline macro-level shock (officially measured at circa 10%, with all the caveats around that measure)
- GoodJokes 4y ago
godmode2019 4y ago
In Australia you would need to double those prices, to be on the low end of prices. Maybe we earn more money?
- bitshiftfaced 4y ago
  The median income in Australia is higher than in the US, yes.
- ac29 4y ago
  An Australian dollar is worth ~30% less than a US Dollar, which explains part of it.
onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
I'm assuming there are many things in that person's basket of goods which did not change in price at all, and many others that did not change in price as much. Housing makes up 37% of the basket. It's noticably absent. And it's measured... Interestingly. Lasagna at a restaurant is just a small part of food away from home which makes up <6% of the basket... https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/r-cpi-e-2021.xlsx https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/r-cpi-e-2...
nonameiguess 4y ago
Thanks to buying almost everything from Amazon, I get a nice record of exactly how much I spent and can compare to the price being offered today, so I'm going to do that. I'm just going to go to 2020 and see what I can find: - Topo Chico 24 pack of 12 oz glass bottles: then $20.99, now not available (damn shame because it's my wife's favorite drink, but these seemed to disappear in the pandemic and never came back) - Chameleon cold brew coffee, 32 oz: then $9.99, now $8.36 - Fire 7 HD tablet for my niece: then $99, now $139 for the Fire 8 - Optimum Nutrition Whey Protein, 5 lbs: then $58.64, now $59.36 - A wireless keyboard: then $29.99, now $27.99 - Deep conditioning hair mask: then $25.00, now $25.55 - Organic Valley heavy whipping cream, 16 oz: then $4.79, now $5.69 - Set of 3 floating shelves: then $14.99, now $13.69 - Fage full-fat greek yogurt, 32 oz: then $5.49, now $5.99 - 1 pint organic blueberries: then $4.49, now $4.49 - 2 pack of 3.4 oz Sensodyne toothpaste: then $20.48, now $12.79 - Cabinet mounted USB fans, 12": then $39.99, now $39.99 This isn't cherry picked in any way, not pulling from memory or looking back after sticker shock. It's just everything I bought in December 2020.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  All of the price changes in my retail purchases are meaningless when compared to price increases in land, healthcare, education, and taxes since I started working in mid 2000s for the location I lived / wanted to live in. Daycare has more than doubled, $20k+/year increase for 2 kids, land is hundreds of thousands more. How much price changes have affected you are very dependent on what resources you were/are aiming to buy and who you are competing against to secure it.
Semaphor 4y ago
I’ve just done that with a selection of products I commonly buy (Germany). 2021 is January till March, 2022 is from July. https://i.imgur.com/suESNqF.png https://i.imgur.com/suESNqF.png Rather painful to see, no idea what happened to Almonds though, maybe they were extra expensive in 2021. I skipped both cauliflower and celery sticks because prices fluctuate wildly for both. I left out meat as well, but ground beef almost doubled in price.

noirbot 4y ago

I'm always curious for some of these how much it's just a problem of round numbers. Something like the vet visit, I totally believe, but marking down the $1 increase in airport parking cost feels like it's less a percentage and more that they just added 1 to the number because making it cost 36 cents more would just be awkward. Not that that doesn't cause a problem for the people paying it, but pricing for relatively cheap items is a coarse instrument. If you're a business owner and you have no idea how long inflation will be this high, you maybe just err on the side of pricing in some future price increases now and raising prices more in one go vs. changing them every couple weeks. Most consumer goods aren't like gas where people just expect the price to go up and down constantly day to day.

gruez 4y ago

That seems massively susceptible to sampling bias. eg. are you really reporting all of your costs, or only the costs that you noticed going up? Meanwhile BLS provides regional CPI numbers[1], which puts "Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA" inflation at 10.1% between Jun 2021 and Jun 2022. https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/factsheet/consumer-price-index-data-tables.htm https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/factsheet/consumer-price-in...

tyingq 4y ago
The CPI is well thought out, though it's possible that their choices on weighting don't match your own spend. Some detail here: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2021.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/2021.htm
- imtringued 4y ago
  People don't seem to grasp that 9% inflation is extremely high across an economy as large as the US. The 70s had 15% inflation, everyone with their rage boner demanding 50% inflation in the CPI wants ridiculous reports of hyperinflation.
  - tyingq 4y ago
    Well, and 9% YoY, where the previous year was also up ~7% from its own previous year. The magic of compound interest and all.
    - Enginerrrd 4y ago
      Yes! And a lot of people forget that, but I calculated it and the average spending increases I've been seeing in my household are up more like 15% YOY over the last 2 years. And that coincides with a significant reduction in consumption on our part as well as substitution for cheaper goods over that same period.
- themaninthedark 4y ago
  If the CPI does not match people's spending habits, then it does not matter if it well thought out or not because it is a bad metric. Looking at the table, Energy(CPI-U 7.348%,CPI-W 9.029%) looks to be massively undervalued. Everything in our modern life, from food and clean water to our leisure activities require energy.
lend000 4y ago
CPI has been engineered to meet targets for a long time. Several major flaws with CPI: Hedonic adjustments are more or less at the mercy of the bureaucrats. For example, new vehicles did not go up in hedonic-adjusted price from 1997 to 2020 according to the BLS [0]. The justification is that new cars have bluetooth and other features that counter-act the price change. An automatic Toyota Corolla was $12373 brand new in 1997. It was $19700 in 2020. Our inflation numbers over those years did not incorporate a price increase AT ALL, so it's a fair assessment that real inflation was higher based on that alone. The Big Mac index has probably always been the most accurate assessment, free of political pressures. And the most fundamental problem: the survey evaluates the median spending of a sample of Americans, but the median American spends pretty much all of their money. So you end up with the dotted line in this chart: [1]. Spoiler, it's pretty much a flat line. Real median wages don't move because CPI is calculated by measuring median wages. If prices rise, people can't <consistently> spend more than all of their money, so they buy cheaper things and buy less of them, and this changes the weights and reduces the inflation numbers. The fact that some economists with PhD's think this makes sense is why you should always do your due diligence instead of accepting a doctor's diagnosis blindly. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01 [1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekly-earnings-over-time-total-men-women.htm# https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekl...
- missedthecue 4y ago
  I agree in general about the hedonic adjustments and their potential for manipulation or miscalculation. But automobiles are probably the worst example! Toyota didn't even roll out passenger side airbags until 1998. Only the driver had them prior to this. The new Corolla has 8 airbags. Today we have better fuel efficiency, collision protection, driver assistance, remote start... Even the seats are more comfortable. Not to mention most car brands have much better warranties today than they did in the '90s. Other things get hedonic adjustments but shouldn't. Shirts for instance.
  - lend000 4y ago
    But it's irrelevant when that's the cheapest new vehicle, most working Americans need a car, and despite better fuel efficiency, it isn't really that much cheaper to own a car. Hedonic adjustments make sense in theory, but in practice it's a loophole to make inflation whatever the government wants it to be. In the case of vehicles, they clearly went overboard. The counterargument to hedonic adjustments is that almost everything should become cheaper over time, including all vehicle parts and assembly, due to technological progress in manufacturing. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume hedonic adjustments should cancel out increases in manufacturing technology and just ignore them both, probably resulting in a simpler AND more accurate CPI.

chomp 4y ago

I'm super skeptical of posts like this because they seem cherry picked, or at best, have local price increases that aren't reflected elsewhere in the country. Half of those are restaurants, who have had challenges for the past 2 years outside of inflation. Gas has its own challenges, a head of lettuce at my local grocer is $1.52 which is cheaper than that person's 2021 price. Notably not included in that post is things like pork, which has fell in half since 2 years ago, and beef has had 4 straight months of decreases. Car prices are also down too from their peak. My point isn't that inflation doesn't exist. It's a very difficult number to compute. My point is that people on the internet aren't good at picking unbiased points to base their data on. Data like this is good to understand how the cost of living is increasing in certain segments, but we all need to remember (I make this mistake sometimes too) that an increase in the cost of living is not inflation.

oldjavacoder 4y ago
"My point isn't that inflation doesn't exist." My wife tells me different, so I'm going with her real world experience in the matter.
- chomp 4y ago
  If you or your wife look at the past and current price of lettuce in the local store and then use that to make the conclusion that the purchasing power of the US Dollar has decreased 47%, then I don't know what to tell you. Your cost of living may have increased, but I do not understand how you can conclude an increase in inflation from living your daily life.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    I know that my total grocery bill (not just lettuce) has more than doubled in the past few years. Gas too. "The purchasing power of the US Dollar has decreased 47%" sounds about right.
    - imtringued 4y ago

SoftTalker 4y ago

Last year I could buy a whole chicken for roasting for about $10. Now they are $17 or so. 70% increase. Beef the same. Pork hasn't jumped as much for some reason. Ground turkey is about the most affordable meat I can find right now, but when you cook it you can see that it has a lot of water in it.

gimmeThaBeet 4y ago
This is where I'm always curious to see what other dynamics are going on in other places, I don't know how else to say it except that has absolutely not been my experience. In live in just normal midwest suburbia, so if there's places living with that, I should really count my blessings I don't. With a lot of these things nowadays, I've been looking at my receipt data and rooting through FRED, and obv the absolute numbers are probably not going to be bang-on, but the percentages are definitely pretty similar. So yeah, it's not fantastic, but FRED data for chicken, beef, sirloin is like 20%, 26%, 51% in two years, which agrees pretty well with what little data I personally have, or their estimate is a fair bit higher for the sirloin (also prob hard to estimate since I wouldn't treat it like as much a commodity as ground beef). Milk is a similar story, FRED has like 40% in two years, knock on wood I don't think I've observed that, but dairy might be a midwest speciality for these purposes. whole chicken, beef, sirloin. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000706111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000706111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0400703613 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0400703613
mellavora 4y ago
Avian flu resulted in mass culls. Feed prices also higher due to Ukraine/grain shortages increasing demand for grain. The very real price increases you are seeing are driven in part by very specific and focused economic shocks which exceed the baseline macro-level shock (officially measured at circa 10%, with all the caveats around that measure)
GoodJokes 4y ago

godmode2019 4y ago

In Australia you would need to double those prices, to be on the low end of prices. Maybe we earn more money?

bitshiftfaced 4y ago
The median income in Australia is higher than in the US, yes.
ac29 4y ago
An Australian dollar is worth ~30% less than a US Dollar, which explains part of it.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

I'm assuming there are many things in that person's basket of goods which did not change in price at all, and many others that did not change in price as much. Housing makes up 37% of the basket. It's noticably absent. And it's measured... Interestingly. Lasagna at a restaurant is just a small part of food away from home which makes up <6% of the basket... https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/r-cpi-e-2021.xlsx https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/r-cpi-e-2...

nonameiguess 4y ago

Thanks to buying almost everything from Amazon, I get a nice record of exactly how much I spent and can compare to the price being offered today, so I'm going to do that. I'm just going to go to 2020 and see what I can find: - Topo Chico 24 pack of 12 oz glass bottles: then $20.99, now not available (damn shame because it's my wife's favorite drink, but these seemed to disappear in the pandemic and never came back) - Chameleon cold brew coffee, 32 oz: then $9.99, now $8.36 - Fire 7 HD tablet for my niece: then $99, now $139 for the Fire 8 - Optimum Nutrition Whey Protein, 5 lbs: then $58.64, now $59.36 - A wireless keyboard: then $29.99, now $27.99 - Deep conditioning hair mask: then $25.00, now $25.55 - Organic Valley heavy whipping cream, 16 oz: then $4.79, now $5.69 - Set of 3 floating shelves: then $14.99, now $13.69 - Fage full-fat greek yogurt, 32 oz: then $5.49, now $5.99 - 1 pint organic blueberries: then $4.49, now $4.49 - 2 pack of 3.4 oz Sensodyne toothpaste: then $20.48, now $12.79 - Cabinet mounted USB fans, 12": then $39.99, now $39.99 This isn't cherry picked in any way, not pulling from memory or looking back after sticker shock. It's just everything I bought in December 2020.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
All of the price changes in my retail purchases are meaningless when compared to price increases in land, healthcare, education, and taxes since I started working in mid 2000s for the location I lived / wanted to live in. Daycare has more than doubled, $20k+/year increase for 2 kids, land is hundreds of thousands more. How much price changes have affected you are very dependent on what resources you were/are aiming to buy and who you are competing against to secure it.

Semaphor 4y ago

I’ve just done that with a selection of products I commonly buy (Germany). 2021 is January till March, 2022 is from July. https://i.imgur.com/suESNqF.png https://i.imgur.com/suESNqF.png Rather painful to see, no idea what happened to Almonds though, maybe they were extra expensive in 2021. I skipped both cauliflower and celery sticks because prices fluctuate wildly for both. I left out meat as well, but ground beef almost doubled in price.