[ceejayoz]

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]

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]

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.

[antisthenes]

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]

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...

[homeland221]

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.

[ceejayoz]

> The person who is doing the national calculation is not pro.

It's not one person, and I can assure you the Bureau of Labor Statistics employs a wide range of professionals.

> I have friends in six states everyone of them tallying their monthly expenses

Cool. Anecdote coupled with strong selection bias.

[adunsulag]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[throw0101a]

> 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

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

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]

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]

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.

[roywiggins]

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.

[jollyllama]

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.

[roywiggins]

It just seems like people have extremely high expectations for what a single number could possibly encompass. It's a single, summary statistic- it's not going to ever be anything more than that. Of course low inflation doesn't mean everything's perfect and prices are just fine. It doesn't say anything about how poor or rich people are, what they can afford, or how wealth is distributed in society.

It is just an (imperfect!) aggregate measure of prices, and it certainly seems to capture something- inflation was low for a long time, then COVID, then it got high, then rates went up, then it went down again. When inflation is very high there aren't many inflation truthers going around insisting that actually, inflation is low; when inflation falls or stays low, there's always people insisting that actually not everything is great. Which: yes! You can have low inflation and all sorts of problems! But having those problems and high inflation is worse.

It's not hiding anything, it's just not rich enough to capture everything you're interested in.

[UncleMeat]

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]

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]

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.