[minkiebun]

FRED does a nice job of cataloguing prices of the most basic ingredients. The history on them makes clear that a lot of these stories round off to noise; people noticing things going up and not noticing when they stay flat or decline.

Take for example eggs: they’re up about 20% over the last two years… but they’re down from 15 years ago, because eggs have (mostly) stayed really cheap for a long time.

And that’s not down in inflation adjusted dollars, it’s just down.

[mikeyouse]

Yep. You need to go back to ~1996 to get to a 2x increase in cost of food at home:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1d3aL

Though as a general rule people notice acceleration not speed, so the big pandemic bump is clearly more impactful than a slower increase.

[rileymat2]

Is there a stat that tracks discount sale prices? I typically craft my purchases around what is discounted, but those “seem” dramatically worse than the general price increases.

[bombcar]

Eggs around here were as low as 29 cents (during an egg price war, to be fair, but normal prices were well below a buck) and during whatever egg crisis there was recently peaked at nearly $4 a dozen. Both were the same "cheapest eggs in the store" though the local farm-raised eggs had a much smaller increase (maybe from $4.29 to $4.79).

Since then the cheapest eggs have come back down somewhat.

The problem is statistics count averages or price on a certain day, etc, people remember the _highest_ price they paid recently.