5 ms·

Get real. Have you bought eggs or butter lately? Random shoppers are literally exclaiming about the price of butter in the store.

penjelly 4y ago
isnt his point that the price of groceries has recently only grown a small amount? compared to previous months or quarters which have grown quite a bit
ceejayoz 4y ago
Sure, you can cherry-pick individual items to tell pretty much any story you like. If the 60% increase in butter prices over the last year is hitting your budget, you probably would benefit from eating less butter. (And I say this as someone who eats a good amount of butter...)
- jollyllama 4y ago
  I'm not cherry picking. Produce is up massively. Heads of broccoli, lettuce, are up at least 20% over the last year! And that's IF you can find them.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    That's further cherry-picking (and I've never been unable to purchase either; we eat brocolli 3-4x a week). The comment you replied to has the non-cherry-picked number for this month's report: "Food at home +0.2%" Some things went up more than others, some recovered faster, and without deflation the prices will remain overall higher than they were a year ago.
    - adunsulag 4y ago
      Perhaps its the people who cook with a lot of home ingredients (eggs, meats, vegetables, fruits) that are feeling the most pain. My food budget has gone up 25% in the last year for the same basket of goods. I track those numbers pretty consistently.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        Yes, some individuals will see higher than average inflation in their basket. Others will see lower than average. That's why we work with the averages for policy decisions rather than looking for individual anecdotes. If I subsist entirely off the cocktail shrimp at my local Wegmans and have no other expenses, my inflation value is something like 500%. Is that a particularly useful number for the Fed? No.
        jollyllama 4y ago
        Cocktail shrimp sounds extravagant; that's not what we're talking about. GP is on point. We're talking about basic staples, the real food you find on the edges of the grocery store, not the highly processed items in the middle.
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        You've misread my comment. The cocktail shrimp example is why "nuh uh, my personal number is higher" is not a valuable data point. Maybe you go to an expensive store, maybe you buy the fancier lettuce, maybe your basket includes some things you consider staples that aren't all that common nationally. It's why we have a nation-wide check on the prices of a well-researched selection of staples in the average proportions they make up in an average person's budget, rather than polling random people on the Internet for anecdotes. That number is far more useful.
    - antisthenes 4y ago
      At some point it stop being cherry picking and becomes an actual measure. The official BLS numbers are underreporting inflation. Overall, groceries are up roughly 35-50% since 2020, while the official numbers would have you believe the inflation was 18.17% over 3 years. BLS does a lot of trickery to generate favorable numbers. There are "quality" adjustments, there are "core" inflation indicators, which exclude goods with high price fluctuations (e.g. eggs). I buy a pretty diverse basket of goods (groceries too) overall, and so far, none of the official inflation figures have even come close to my observed price increases. Lumber, tools and hardware in home improvement stores are all up 30-60%. Food, like I said, is up 30% at minimum since the start of the pandemic. Maybe clothes and TVs kept a stable price, but who cares?
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
        Sigh. "My personal number is higher" isn't a good way to contest a national, fairly rigorous process run by professionals. I can pick a basket of goods from my local Wegmans that's gone up 100%; I don't doubt it's higher than the CPI number for some people. That's how averages work; there'll be some people for which it's lower, too, and their anecdotes have equally little value for national policy decisions. Lumber, incidentally, is back to normal nationally. Down 63% in 2022. If you're still seeing 60% above normal, you're either in an area with a supply issue, or you're getting hosed by the store. https://www.wxpr.org/business-economics/2023-01-04/despite-inflation-lumber-prices-have-returned-to-pre-pandemic-levels https://www.wxpr.org/business-economics/2023-01-04/despite-i...
        homeland221 4y ago
        You want to talk about professionals? Why not Shadowstat? The person who is doing the national calculation is not pro. They are bureaucrats subject to political adjustments. I have friends in six states everyone of them tallying their monthly expenses which increased more than 30%+ compared sametime last year. If yours didnt either you have significantly cut down your expense or oddly expensing very different to many others. The CPI is grossly not reflecting the reality.
        4y ago
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > Produce is up massively. And? Food prices make up ~13% of the BLS CPI because, according to their surveys, that is what the national average is for an average basket of goods: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey If you purchase more or less food than average, then your personal CPI will be different that the average that is reported in headlines. Further, the fact that you see some the price (inflation) in your face regularly is a form of cognitive bias: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias People noticed petrol prices go up and that inflation, but they're thinking less about the deflation of petrol going down, probably because they think the lower prices are "normal".
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    That's just more cherry picking. The appropriate thing to do is to create a collection of food items that represent some sort of average of the population expenses and measure that. And when they do this, they compute that food-at-home rose 0.2% in December (2.4% annualized).
    - jollyllama 4y ago
      Two thirds of adults in the US are overweight or obese. You don't want to eat the average basket of goods they're eating.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        So? The federal reserve would have to have a very different mandate for it to make policy based off of a basket optimized for public health. I'm sorry that your personal food prices are higher. I just don't see why it matters at scale.
        tarboreus 4y ago
        Great, the price of ramen noodles and curved screen TVs is stable. Thanks, Fed, time to set interest rates at -1% for the next ten years of whacky growth.
        roywiggins 4y ago
        Low inflation doesn't mean everything is fine, it just means that you don't have exponentially inflating prices on top of whatever other problems you've got.
      - roywiggins 4y ago
        Okay, but the experience of the average American is what actually matters when tallying inflation. It's not about what people "should" be spending money on, it's about what people actually spend money on. Surely putting together an inflation index consciously designed not to replicate an average American diet would be a much, much worse measure of food inflation than one that does actually try to model the average American's situation? "Everyone should be going paleo so the index shouldn't have bread in it" is a self-evidently bad idea, that's not a statistician's job. A single inflation number is hardly ever going to be a correct measurement of any single person's experience of inflation, but that's inevitable. There are real criticisms to make, such as the average basket of goods not characterizing the inflation felt by the poorest, because they spend money on different things than people with a bit more money.
roywiggins 4y ago
How much of the average shopper's budget is eggs? If it's not that big a percentage then you're just not going to see it in the overall inflation rate, and you wouldn't expect to.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  Eggs are significant ingredient in many homemade things (eggs, bread, pancakes, pastas, brownies) and one of the cheapest,cleanest protein sources in the American diet. The Aivian flu + inflation caused a carton of 18 eggs to increase in price more than 50% recently (<$5 to > $7.50). My household has fought this increase by increasing mushrooms and spinach in our eggs, and recently hybridizing with liquid egg whites.
  - throw0101a 4y ago
    > Eggs are significant ingredient in many homemade things (eggs, bread, pancakes, pastas, brownies) and one of the cheapest,cleanest protein sources in the American diet. Yes, and food makes up ~13% of the BLS CPI. This is taken into account when they do their surveys to see what people are spending their money on: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey Remember that the CPI is the national average inflation for an average basket of goods, and not your personal inflation. In Canada, StatCan actually has a personal CPI tool so that you can see how things are for your personal basket of goods: * https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...
    - smileysteve 4y ago
      I'm not questioning the survey results, I am challenging the lack of importance of eggs.
      - throw0101c 4y ago
        > I'm not questioning the survey results, I am challenging the lack of importance of eggs. The survey would determine how many eggs people eat, both directly (omelettes) or indirectly (or as a component, as in cake): * https://www.statista.com/statistics/183678/per-capita-consumption-of-eggs-in-the-us-since-2000/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183678/per-capita-consum... And from there the BLS would know how many to put in the basket of goods it uses. Which they have listed in this table: * https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm And here's the data series for the price of eggs: * https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000708111 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000708111 * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=bls%3Beggs https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=bls%3Beggs What people put in the the survey would indicate the the "importance of eggs" (in the average case).
rsynnott 4y ago
If the only thing you eat is eggs, then you're a weird edge-case not accounted for in the standard inflation figures, of course.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Everything on the outside of the store has increased in price in the last year. Produce is way up.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  Eggs are one of the cheapest and cleanest proteins; They're also used extensively in baking from breads, brownies, cakes, and pastas. I eat 3 eggs a day for breakfast, 4+ days a week for the last 25 years.
  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Ok so one carton of eggs a week. Also, it seems pretty silly to talk about a dollar of extra cost as a problem in the context of making homemade pasta. Homemade pasta is a time intensive luxury.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    That's 12 eggs a week. So if the price of a dozen eggs has gone from $2 to $5 you are out... $150 a year. And that's for a sizable outlier in egg consumption. It isn't hard to see how this doesn't push overall inflation very meaningfully. Most store-bought dried pasta has zero egg in it. An entire homemade cake has like three eggs in it. So the price of an entire cake is up less than a dollar. How many cakes does the average household bake in a year?
    - smileysteve 4y ago
      You received the incorrect message from my post - Cleanest (High Protein, Low fat) - Cheapest (Cheaper than pork and chicken per g of protein) - An important ingredient (as a lectin) in many baked goods You then turn this into an absolute number for 1. But your absolute number of a $150/person/year would certainly approach 10% of my annual grocery spend... which lines up. Your absolute number would be frightening for a family of 4 making the median income. Inflation is not personally affecting me negatively - for the record, I think it's a reversion to the mean and 10 years of fed targets finally being achieved.
bluejekyll 4y ago
For folks unaware, the reason eggs have become more expensive in the US is due to an avian flu that is killing a significant number of egg laying hens.
- jollyllama 4y ago
  Do you happen to know why in November it was difficult to find lettuce?
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    https://www.agalert.com/california-ag-news/archives/november-9-2022/salinas-valley-farmers-hit-by-lettuce-virus/ https://www.agalert.com/california-ag-news/archives/november... https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/salinas-crop-disease-affecting-lettuce-17659990.php https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/salinas-crop-disease-aff... https://www.ksbw.com/article/pathogens-destroying-salinas-valley-lettuce/41960122 https://www.ksbw.com/article/pathogens-destroying-salinas-va...
    - jollyllama 4y ago
      Interesting. At what point do we conclude we have systemic issues with our agriculture?
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        It is complicated. Raw leafy greens are now a major disease vector since they can come into contact with animal waste during processing and the safety of animal protein has improved dramatically over the past few generations. This leads to sudden "oh fuck, destroy the entire crop" situations that spike prices. That's bad. But... there is no question that industrialized agriculture keeps the price of lettuce lower on average than non-industrialized approaches. If you are just watching prices, the trade is still positive.
UncleMeat 4y ago
Eggs are way up. Fortunately, the government takes a blend of different products and presents the overall price change. If we made policy off the whims of onion prices, for example, we'd be in for a wild ride. Every month for the last six months has produced the same comment. Overall inflation is low so somebody picks out a specific thing that went up a lot and implies that the government numbers are either misleading or lies. Interestingly, it is a different chosen product each month. Egg prices are also being driven largely by disease and culling and don't really represent something that should be attacked with monetary policy.

penjelly 4y ago

isnt his point that the price of groceries has recently only grown a small amount? compared to previous months or quarters which have grown quite a bit

ceejayoz 4y ago

Sure, you can cherry-pick individual items to tell pretty much any story you like. If the 60% increase in butter prices over the last year is hitting your budget, you probably would benefit from eating less butter. (And I say this as someone who eats a good amount of butter...)

jollyllama 4y ago
I'm not cherry picking. Produce is up massively. Heads of broccoli, lettuce, are up at least 20% over the last year! And that's IF you can find them.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  That's further cherry-picking (and I've never been unable to purchase either; we eat brocolli 3-4x a week). The comment you replied to has the non-cherry-picked number for this month's report: "Food at home +0.2%" Some things went up more than others, some recovered faster, and without deflation the prices will remain overall higher than they were a year ago.
  - adunsulag 4y ago
    Perhaps its the people who cook with a lot of home ingredients (eggs, meats, vegetables, fruits) that are feeling the most pain. My food budget has gone up 25% in the last year for the same basket of goods. I track those numbers pretty consistently.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Yes, some individuals will see higher than average inflation in their basket. Others will see lower than average. That's why we work with the averages for policy decisions rather than looking for individual anecdotes. If I subsist entirely off the cocktail shrimp at my local Wegmans and have no other expenses, my inflation value is something like 500%. Is that a particularly useful number for the Fed? No.
      - jollyllama 4y ago
        Cocktail shrimp sounds extravagant; that's not what we're talking about. GP is on point. We're talking about basic staples, the real food you find on the edges of the grocery store, not the highly processed items in the middle.
        ceejayoz 4y ago
        You've misread my comment. The cocktail shrimp example is why "nuh uh, my personal number is higher" is not a valuable data point. Maybe you go to an expensive store, maybe you buy the fancier lettuce, maybe your basket includes some things you consider staples that aren't all that common nationally. It's why we have a nation-wide check on the prices of a well-researched selection of staples in the average proportions they make up in an average person's budget, rather than polling random people on the Internet for anecdotes. That number is far more useful.
  - antisthenes 4y ago
    At some point it stop being cherry picking and becomes an actual measure. The official BLS numbers are underreporting inflation. Overall, groceries are up roughly 35-50% since 2020, while the official numbers would have you believe the inflation was 18.17% over 3 years. BLS does a lot of trickery to generate favorable numbers. There are "quality" adjustments, there are "core" inflation indicators, which exclude goods with high price fluctuations (e.g. eggs). I buy a pretty diverse basket of goods (groceries too) overall, and so far, none of the official inflation figures have even come close to my observed price increases. Lumber, tools and hardware in home improvement stores are all up 30-60%. Food, like I said, is up 30% at minimum since the start of the pandemic. Maybe clothes and TVs kept a stable price, but who cares?
    - ceejayoz 4y ago
      Sigh. "My personal number is higher" isn't a good way to contest a national, fairly rigorous process run by professionals. I can pick a basket of goods from my local Wegmans that's gone up 100%; I don't doubt it's higher than the CPI number for some people. That's how averages work; there'll be some people for which it's lower, too, and their anecdotes have equally little value for national policy decisions. Lumber, incidentally, is back to normal nationally. Down 63% in 2022. If you're still seeing 60% above normal, you're either in an area with a supply issue, or you're getting hosed by the store. https://www.wxpr.org/business-economics/2023-01-04/despite-inflation-lumber-prices-have-returned-to-pre-pandemic-levels https://www.wxpr.org/business-economics/2023-01-04/despite-i...
      - homeland221 4y ago
        You want to talk about professionals? Why not Shadowstat? The person who is doing the national calculation is not pro. They are bureaucrats subject to political adjustments. I have friends in six states everyone of them tallying their monthly expenses which increased more than 30%+ compared sametime last year. If yours didnt either you have significantly cut down your expense or oddly expensing very different to many others. The CPI is grossly not reflecting the reality.
        4y ago
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Produce is up massively. And? Food prices make up ~13% of the BLS CPI because, according to their surveys, that is what the national average is for an average basket of goods: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey If you purchase more or less food than average, then your personal CPI will be different that the average that is reported in headlines. Further, the fact that you see some the price (inflation) in your face regularly is a form of cognitive bias: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attentional_bias People noticed petrol prices go up and that inflation, but they're thinking less about the deflation of petrol going down, probably because they think the lower prices are "normal".
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  That's just more cherry picking. The appropriate thing to do is to create a collection of food items that represent some sort of average of the population expenses and measure that. And when they do this, they compute that food-at-home rose 0.2% in December (2.4% annualized).
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    Two thirds of adults in the US are overweight or obese. You don't want to eat the average basket of goods they're eating.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      So? The federal reserve would have to have a very different mandate for it to make policy based off of a basket optimized for public health. I'm sorry that your personal food prices are higher. I just don't see why it matters at scale.
      - tarboreus 4y ago
        Great, the price of ramen noodles and curved screen TVs is stable. Thanks, Fed, time to set interest rates at -1% for the next ten years of whacky growth.
        roywiggins 4y ago
        Low inflation doesn't mean everything is fine, it just means that you don't have exponentially inflating prices on top of whatever other problems you've got.
    - roywiggins 4y ago
      Okay, but the experience of the average American is what actually matters when tallying inflation. It's not about what people "should" be spending money on, it's about what people actually spend money on. Surely putting together an inflation index consciously designed not to replicate an average American diet would be a much, much worse measure of food inflation than one that does actually try to model the average American's situation? "Everyone should be going paleo so the index shouldn't have bread in it" is a self-evidently bad idea, that's not a statistician's job. A single inflation number is hardly ever going to be a correct measurement of any single person's experience of inflation, but that's inevitable. There are real criticisms to make, such as the average basket of goods not characterizing the inflation felt by the poorest, because they spend money on different things than people with a bit more money.

roywiggins 4y ago

How much of the average shopper's budget is eggs? If it's not that big a percentage then you're just not going to see it in the overall inflation rate, and you wouldn't expect to.

smileysteve 4y ago
Eggs are significant ingredient in many homemade things (eggs, bread, pancakes, pastas, brownies) and one of the cheapest,cleanest protein sources in the American diet. The Aivian flu + inflation caused a carton of 18 eggs to increase in price more than 50% recently (<$5 to > $7.50). My household has fought this increase by increasing mushrooms and spinach in our eggs, and recently hybridizing with liquid egg whites.
- throw0101a 4y ago
  > Eggs are significant ingredient in many homemade things (eggs, bread, pancakes, pastas, brownies) and one of the cheapest,cleanest protein sources in the American diet. Yes, and food makes up ~13% of the BLS CPI. This is taken into account when they do their surveys to see what people are spending their money on: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey Remember that the CPI is the national average inflation for an average basket of goods, and not your personal inflation. In Canada, StatCan actually has a personal CPI tool so that you can see how things are for your personal basket of goods: * https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015-eng.htm https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    I'm not questioning the survey results, I am challenging the lack of importance of eggs.
    - throw0101c 4y ago
      > I'm not questioning the survey results, I am challenging the lack of importance of eggs. The survey would determine how many eggs people eat, both directly (omelettes) or indirectly (or as a component, as in cake): * https://www.statista.com/statistics/183678/per-capita-consumption-of-eggs-in-the-us-since-2000/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183678/per-capita-consum... And from there the BLS would know how many to put in the basket of goods it uses. Which they have listed in this table: * https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm And here's the data series for the price of eggs: * https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000708111 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000708111 * https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=bls%3Beggs https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=bls%3Beggs What people put in the the survey would indicate the the "importance of eggs" (in the average case).

rsynnott 4y ago

If the only thing you eat is eggs, then you're a weird edge-case not accounted for in the standard inflation figures, of course.

jollyllama 4y ago
Everything on the outside of the store has increased in price in the last year. Produce is way up.
smileysteve 4y ago
Eggs are one of the cheapest and cleanest proteins; They're also used extensively in baking from breads, brownies, cakes, and pastas. I eat 3 eggs a day for breakfast, 4+ days a week for the last 25 years.
- oneoff786 4y ago
  Ok so one carton of eggs a week. Also, it seems pretty silly to talk about a dollar of extra cost as a problem in the context of making homemade pasta. Homemade pasta is a time intensive luxury.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  That's 12 eggs a week. So if the price of a dozen eggs has gone from $2 to $5 you are out... $150 a year. And that's for a sizable outlier in egg consumption. It isn't hard to see how this doesn't push overall inflation very meaningfully. Most store-bought dried pasta has zero egg in it. An entire homemade cake has like three eggs in it. So the price of an entire cake is up less than a dollar. How many cakes does the average household bake in a year?
  - smileysteve 4y ago
    You received the incorrect message from my post - Cleanest (High Protein, Low fat) - Cheapest (Cheaper than pork and chicken per g of protein) - An important ingredient (as a lectin) in many baked goods You then turn this into an absolute number for 1. But your absolute number of a $150/person/year would certainly approach 10% of my annual grocery spend... which lines up. Your absolute number would be frightening for a family of 4 making the median income. Inflation is not personally affecting me negatively - for the record, I think it's a reversion to the mean and 10 years of fed targets finally being achieved.

bluejekyll 4y ago

For folks unaware, the reason eggs have become more expensive in the US is due to an avian flu that is killing a significant number of egg laying hens.

jollyllama 4y ago
Do you happen to know why in November it was difficult to find lettuce?
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  https://www.agalert.com/california-ag-news/archives/november-9-2022/salinas-valley-farmers-hit-by-lettuce-virus/ https://www.agalert.com/california-ag-news/archives/november... https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/salinas-crop-disease-affecting-lettuce-17659990.php https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/salinas-crop-disease-aff... https://www.ksbw.com/article/pathogens-destroying-salinas-valley-lettuce/41960122 https://www.ksbw.com/article/pathogens-destroying-salinas-va...
  - jollyllama 4y ago
    Interesting. At what point do we conclude we have systemic issues with our agriculture?
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      It is complicated. Raw leafy greens are now a major disease vector since they can come into contact with animal waste during processing and the safety of animal protein has improved dramatically over the past few generations. This leads to sudden "oh fuck, destroy the entire crop" situations that spike prices. That's bad. But... there is no question that industrialized agriculture keeps the price of lettuce lower on average than non-industrialized approaches. If you are just watching prices, the trade is still positive.

UncleMeat 4y ago

Eggs are way up. Fortunately, the government takes a blend of different products and presents the overall price change. If we made policy off the whims of onion prices, for example, we'd be in for a wild ride. Every month for the last six months has produced the same comment. Overall inflation is low so somebody picks out a specific thing that went up a lot and implies that the government numbers are either misleading or lies. Interestingly, it is a different chosen product each month. Egg prices are also being driven largely by disease and culling and don't really represent something that should be attacked with monetary policy.