[PhantomGremlin]

Compare that to 0.8% in the US for 2014

Many of the things I buy in a grocery store in the USA go up 5% or 10% at a time, perhaps every year or two. Same situation with services.

The official inflation numbers for the US are very tricky. There's a lot of "adjustment" going on. I suspect that the rapidly falling prices for household electronic goods plays a big role.

The price of a 55" flat screen declining from (made up numbers) $1,500 to $500 in the last five years is small consolation if the price of meat and milk and cookies has gone up 25% over those five years.

[tsotha]

The "basket" they use for CPI calculation is a genuinely difficult problem, since what people buy changes over time. Electronics is a great illustration - if I included 40" televisions last year, should I compare the price of this year's 40" television to last year's, or should I compare the price of this year's 50" television to last year's 40" because that's what people are buying? Both ways are right and both ways are wrong, depending on what you want the number to mean.

But even allowing for these difficulties, I still think the government keeps changing how inflation is calculated in an effort to make itself look better.

When real estate increases dramatically they measure rents, which are (in a hot real estate market) subsidized by people trying to cash in on capital appreciation. In a declining real estate market with rising rents they switch to "rent equivalents" based in some part on the cost of real estate.

You can hide pretty big increases by switching what you measure mid-stream, particularly if you just graph the YoY official inflation rate (including changes) without going back and recalculating every year using the same methodology.

And then there's the reporting. The number you hear on the news may or may not include "the volatile food and energy sectors" depending on which is lower.

There's a reason it seems prices are rising faster than the CPI reported on your drive home. They are rising faster.

[gusmd]

That feeling you are describing happens everywhere. In the US, inflation is usually tracked by the CPI [0], which uses the average monthly price of a market basket [1].

The tricky thing is in finding the correct weights of each item in the basket as to be representative. As you can imagine, different people shop differently, so won't experience the same inflation.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Consumer_Price_In... [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_basket

[Spooky23]

I think the CPI is great for what it is, but it's easy to mistake it for something it isn't.

Everything in it is based on averages, and there are lots of differences between individuals that affect your realization of price changes.

Examples: I drive 5 minutes to work, my officemate drives 90 minutes -- gas prices mean nothing to me. If you have 4 kids, meat and dairy escalations hit you harder than average. If you're a vegan, seasonal price swings of produce are more meaningful, and factored out of CPI.

CPI also only looks at consumption. We've had 2-3% price growth with low wage growth. Less buying power magnifies price changes.

[vacri]

'big screen TV' is just about the worst economic indicator there is, yet it's constantly used to insult poor people and imply that their problems are simply due to being wastrels.

I was once wandering through the swampy Mekong delta, and there were huts there that didn't close fully against the weather, with dirt floors, surrounded by mosquito-laden stagnant pods... and they had big screen TVs. They weren't this year's models, and more than a few of them were CRTs, but they were still in these dirt-poor houses.

Back here in Australia, the retail market is so tight for 'big screen TVs' that it's pretty common for retailers to give four-year interest free terms. That's only $10/week for a $2k screen over 4 years, less than one hour's minimum wage, after tax. And, as you say, a big screen TV is a pretty small part of the cost of living, overall.

The sooner we abandon 'big screen tv' as a proxy for measuring wealth, the better.

[gcb0]

i've been buying the same items (specific diet craze) from the same whole foods from 2009 to today.

my monthly cost on that alone jumped from $300ish to well into the $500.

it's mostly organic produce, a few meats, lots of seafood (which i grant that it has a very volatile market price but still)

So i'd say for quality quasi-essential products, it is even higher than that. probably because premium shops were keeping their profits a little lower because of the 2008-2010 crisis.