Comment by timdaub | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timdaub | Hacker News Reader

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I live in Berlin Germany. I've been manually tracking all my grocery costs over 2 years now in an Google Spreadsheet. I'm a single person and I buy organic food. I work from home and I don't eat a lot outside. I cook probably on average 1.5 times a day. My general monthly bill on food is 600€. My methodology has been this:

- I pay all my groceries with my debit card

- Then, to get the cost for a month; I take all debit card entries in my online banking and sum them up

- I then compare the finding to older findings.

Last time I checked, the costs of my groceries hasn't gone up. So far, it has never gone up in any significant form over the last two years. Maybe by 5% but by no means +50% like the parent post suggests.

I sometimes also get anxious about "inflation" when the cashier quotes an unexpected price. And it's why I've started double checking my intuition with the above-outlined process.

Indeed, some times the shopping ends up more expensive as e.g. I bought an extra pack of coffee or meat.

Your method doesn't control for shrinkflation[0] if only looking at your debit card statements.

[0] https://www.mouseprint.org/category/downsiz/

Edit:

Humans aren't robots folks, if there's consistently some excess food being disposed of it could simply mean there's slightly less going into the wastebin.

And regarding TP, I don't know about you, but I tend to be wasteful with TP when the roll is fresh and increasingly frugal as the roll approaches empty.

This is all highly subjective but the fact is people tend to be inconsistent and wasteful.

You need to track normalized unit costs for such data to be reliable. Package sizes are constantly being manipulated, period.

If, say toilet roll, is smaller quantities wouldn't you end up buying more of it which will also reflect in your monthly budget?

Unless he is eating less and less, it should control for that.

Wouldn't it though? I mean, caloric intake doesn't fluctuate much. If smaller sizes were ending up leaving this person hungry, presumably they'd end up buying more to compensate.

Not generally. Vast majority of people eat well past simple hunger satiation. In regards to non edible goods, a few less sheets per paper towel role would likely not be noticed in the short term but taken over a year would like reflect an extra role or 2 purchased.

I have managed to maintain a body mass of 90kg but nice try!

does CPI control for shrinkflation? correctly? fully?

You would also need to consider if you changed any purchase habits. If you comparison shop, or focus on buying whatever cut of meat is on sale, or similar, then you might actually be buying a different distribution of items.

Actually, I probably only buy meat every second week.

And I've been consistently going to the same shop.

>My general monthly bill on food is 600€.

This is crazy, are you on a meat only diet or do you go to very expensive restaurants? Otherwise I struggle to believe it.

20 euros a day for 3 meals?

That would be on the cheap side in a number of cities.

> and I buy organic food

Whatever that means, but it sounds expensive.

organic food "Bio" is wildly expensive here in Germany...

Also: the 600€ is groceries only. I don't track the cost of going to restaurants. It'd probably significantly increase total food costs.

I know the prices in Germany. I can see how one would spend €300 or even €400... but €600 just seems a lot. Maybe if you eat a lot of expensive imported items and such.

I don't really see anything crazy about this. Poster eats organic food and lives in an expensive city. If he works out he probably consumes a good amount of food.

That's not at all crazy. Spending 600 euros or dollars monthly on food for a single person is actually quite reasonable—as another commenter pointed out, it's about 20 euros per day for all three meals.

In my experience, "moderately expensive" restaurants (I don't actually go to what I'd term "very expensive" restaurants) come in at $40-50 per plate. That means that just for dinner, if they were going to very expensive restaurants every day they'd be paying roughly twice what they quoted.

They said they were talking about "grocery costs", and later clarified it was groceries only [1], which is very different from restaurant prices.

For comparison, our household (US) spends ~$200/person/month on groceries (also with very little eating out). Food here in the US is cheaper, and we aren't mostly buying organic, but we are using Instacart. I'm also surprised they are getting such a large number.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29513375

How much do you spend?

America has the cheapest food in the world, by a long way

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...

I know food prices in Germany and US ... US is more expensive in my experience. Not by a lot, but noticeable.

It doesn't seems crazy to me.

Like OP said, they live in an expensive West European city and buy almost only organic products which consists, in part, of meat and imported products.

I myself live in a West European cit and buy almost only organic products that are plant based and mostly locals. It costs me around ~300€/month.

Still, OP pays double that. But : - The city I live in is way smaller than Berlin so it's obviously cheaper (going often in Paris for work, I can assume by how much) - I don't eat meat. Organic meat is probably (after luxury restaurant) the most expensive way to feed someone so I have no doubt that if I added meat to my diet I would be paying (a lot) more than 300€/month - 80% of my vegetables come from a local farmer with whom I have a yearly contract, which divide probably by two the vegetables cost compared to buying them in a store - Except for a few things that can't be cultivated locally (at a country scale), most of the food I buy didn't to make more than 1000km to arrive in the shop - I'll take a wild guess but while 80% of what I buy is "raw food", OP is probably buying more prepared product which again makes it more expensive - Another guess but OP is probably making their groceries in a in-town shop where prices are higher (because of rent and delivery constraints) than shops around town made for suburban people, while in my case I go in those cheaper shops to take advantage of the longer route to ride my bicycle more

All that combined, I'm not surprised by the figures given by OP since they're eating one of the most expensive diet a Western European can eat. And I'm not saying it in a bad way. I'm just trying to see facts.

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