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.
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.
> 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:
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:
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...)
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?
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-i...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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".
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).
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.
Ok, since you strawmanned me against bread (which has also increased significantly, at least 5% YOY) , let's consider this: if nobody could afford anything but Doritos, and the price of Doritos went from $4 to $3, then the average basket of goods would go decrease in price >20%. It's a great model if you want to hide the deteriorating quality of life behind effectively meaningless stats. What I don't understand is why so many people feel compelled to defend it so vigorously.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
- 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.
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.