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I understand it is a complicated calculation but to me personally, inflation feels much more than that. I have been tracking the price of milk. Around 3 months
by dwa3592 5mo ago
I understand it is a complicated calculation but to me personally, inflation feels much more than that. I have been tracking the price of milk. Around 3 months ago, i was getting a gallon of milk at $2.97, then it went up to 3.07, then 3.25. Yesterday I paid 3.40. That's like 15% gain on something as basic as milk. All numbers from the same store.
- trashface 5mo agoThat's probably fuel costs. The milk and everything else comes in on a truck (and dairy farming is also fuel intensive itself)
- dominotw 5mo agomilk prices go up and down even outside inflation cycles. how do you know this is inflation. price of milk at your local grocery store in last 3 months is not enough data to attribute causation.
- dwa3592 5mo agoup and down 15% every 3 months? if that's the case then I take my comment back. I am not super aware of how milk pricing works.
- dominotw 5mo ago[flagged]
- triceratops 5mo agoThis has serious "the climate changes naturally" energy.
- dominotw 5mo agoit doesnt if you care to look for many instances in data where local milk prices didnt reflect broader inflation trends. but you are more interested in making idiotic snarky comments and feel smug.
- triceratops 5mo ago"My city got record snow therefore global warming is bogus"
- kingleopold 5mo agooffical inflation numbers are just LIE and wrongg for decades. Now you see it yourself. Via wrong numbers, they steal trillions
- laweijfmvo 5mo agoyou’re not totally wrong but it’s not the outright lie you seem to imply. things like tweaks to the “standard basket” that they claim are in line with consumer preferences, which themselves changed because of inflation, for example, are one way we get a sort of hidden shrink flation.
- chromatin 5mo agoI disagree and think GP poster is right on the money. There are many ways in which inflation numbers are cooked; just one of them is the hedonic adjustment [1]. Others include an un-representative basket of goods. The basket of goods is adjusted every 2 years, but not necessarily in a way that mirrors the way real households adapt their spending patterns to increased prices. Owner equivalent rent (LOL) massively lags behind home prices. Honestly, when 10s or hundreds of millions of people's perception does not match *Official Government Numbers*, then it's reason to suspect that the official numbers are a poor metric. [1] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/ https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/
- toasty228 5mo agoBut it is a lie, all the basics are skyrocketing and all the useless tech gadgets are getting cheaper (or better, which counts as deflation for them). If food is 30% more expensive but cars/TVs are 0% more expensive but 10 times "better" you get an overall "3% inflation" They adopted a new way to adjust inflation in 1990, and since then everything has been perfect lmao: https://www.shadowstats.com/imgs/sgs-cpi.gif?hl=ad&t= https://www.shadowstats.com/imgs/sgs-cpi.gif?hl=ad&t=
- spwa4 5mo agoOh the reason it is a lie, of course, is not so much the number itself but the fact that it gets redefined, most recently with the purpose of a "robust updating". The new definition of inflation, of course, always seem to define inflation lower. I seem to have read an article that states that by the 1980s measure inflation hit 15%. Other alternative measures go the same way, with the famous big mac index crossing 10%. In Europe, they seem to do the same, but seem more fans of actually falsifying the underlying figures (like the LIBOR incident, which turned out to raise mortgage payment yet lower inflation) Asian central banks (by which we mean China) do it yet another way. They simply declare inflation, 4 years ahead of time, to be a certain value. Then inflation is that value. Of course, last time "for some reason" the economic measures that made up the definition of inflation were suddenly declared state secrets. Of course this may just be the banks moving at different speeds. Europe used to fix it's inflation problems by redefining what inflation was. They moved on to falsifying data. I guess that's just what's in the FED's future.
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoInflation itself is not a good metric as soon as you leave the avg. You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low. That 15% cost is not relevant if you don't drink milk. Its also a lot less if you are able to save money. That money saved might be for something very specific like one specific car or a house. The house market, as far as i understand it, is more decoupled from inflation than not. Here in germany a farm costs still 600k and goes up and down based on location and other factors. My money in the bank doesn't has to be inflation neutral, it should be house market neutral for the money i only want to buy a house for. You can also choose and change your buying power. Instead of the sports car x, you can buy y. Instead of buying the city center house, you can buy the farm outside.
- dwa3592 5mo agoOur household income is less than the US household median. So that price increase on milk does feel a bit more stingy than I'd like to be.
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoYou are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low. This is a weird statement coming from a German bystander commenting on American politics with the username "Anti-USA".
- AntiUSAbah 5mo agoWhy? This is not US politics. Its global politics and it affects me as well. Independent of this, hn is not a platform the avg person is visiting. It requires a certain amount of high tech expertise to understand the conent of hn which statistically pushes the avg hn reader above the avg person. You do know how much impact the USA has around the globe right? right?!
- b40d-48b2-979e 5mo agoYou are wildly overestimating your own self-worth with the "above the avg person" statement. hn is just a website. People browse and read whatever.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- tansey 5mo agoThe fed tracks this data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000709112 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000709112
- jeffbee 5mo agoA better source is the USDA AMS which surveys the prices of several different milk products in retail outlets in many cities. They do this not only for milk but many common foods. The data goes back decades. Example report https://mymarketnews.ams.usda.gov/filerepo/sites/default/files/3356/2026-04-01/1319422/ams_3356_00083.pdf https://mymarketnews.ams.usda.gov/filerepo/sites/default/fil...
- kccqzy 5mo agoYeah my large bag of whey protein (derived from milk) went up from $35 to $55. Same store and same brand.
- runako 5mo agoOne thing I have noted during this inflationary period is that individual stores/chains are gaming pricing much more than I remember before. For example, your store might be competing for business using the headline price of eggs and making it up on milk and bread. In our city, Whole Foods was the cheapest non-warehouse place to buy eggs for a while. Anecdotally, it looks like one could save a relatively large % on various goods simply by going to a different store, which was not the case a few short years ago. Relative pricing stability appears to have collapsed, shopping is more intellectually-intensive now.
- dwa3592 5mo agoYou are right and we did shop around for a while to optimize for the best value for the price we were paying. We ended up on a store (Aldi, in this case) which overall had the cheapest basic groceries.
- irishcoffee 5mo agoThe problem with shopping at 5 stores to save money on groceries is that with gas prices you're probably not saving money, and if you're not moving around to various stores using any type of energy but kinetic, it is a large opportunity cost that could be spent doing other things, if you even have the time at all. There is no way I could go shop at 5, or even 3 stores a week for food, I simply do not have the time. (Spouse and I both work full-time, 3 kids at 3 different ages going to 3 different schools every day, etc)
- rurp 5mo agoWhat I do is rotate through 4-5 stores but only go to one per week. I stock up on paper towels or whatever when I'm at the store that has the best prices on them, and so on for other goods. I actually do know someone who regularly hits up multiple grocery stores every week chasing deals and that does seem crazy to me. The cost in gas and time doesn't at all seem worth it.
- irishcoffee 5mo agoThat’s a pretty good idea. At the moment my wife and I have the e same login to the Walmart app, we both add things to the same list over the week, and smash “deliver” between various weekend commitment time slots where one of us will be home. The time saved is enormous, and the amount of money we might be saving by being more scrupulous is probably on the order of 5-10 bucks/week, which granted does add up over the course of a year. I like to think it’s a wash with the gas/car maintenance we would be spending, but who knows how accurate that is. Works well enough for us, at this stage in life. Walmart is on the very cheap/low quality end of the spectrum, and we cook all our meals/pack lunches. Always open to new ideas as it relates to saving money and being more efficient with time. These kiddos won’t be kiddos before we know it and we try to optimize our time with them as much as we can.
- darth_avocado 5mo agoBecause real inflation that people feel is always much worse than the actual number. No one cares if the TVs got cheaper but everyone cares if milk and eggs are more expensive. The average number will still tell you inflation isn’t that bad. Plus variations in local pricing can affect people much more. Dense cities will see a much higher inflation rate than rural areas.
- toasty228 5mo agoInflation numbers are a scam, that's all, really. They apply random multipliers to many products to account for "quality" and "performance", it completely skew the numbers and doesn't reflect the life of most people. They even give you an example showing how the same car but with 3 more speeds, "smartphone integration" and "keyless entry" should be 3.6% inflation but actually counts as 0.6% Same for computers, mobiles, etc. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/vehicles.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/vehicles.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/wireless-telephone-service.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/wireless-telephone-servic... https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/personal-computers.htm https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/personal-computers.htm