Get real. Have you bought eggs or butter lately? Random shoppers are literally exclaiming about the price of butter in the store.
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.
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:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Expenditure_Survey
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:
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...
The survey would determine how many eggs people eat, both directly (omelettes) or indirectly (or as a component, as in cake):
* https://www.statista.com/statistics/183678/per-capita-consum...
And from there the BLS would know how many to put in the basket of goods it uses. Which they have listed in this table:
* https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm
And here's the data series for the price of eggs:
* https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/APU0000708111
* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/tags/series?t=bls%3Beggs
What people put in the the survey would indicate the the "importance of eggs" (in the average case).
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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".
And when they do this, they compute that food-at-home rose 0.2% in December (2.4% annualized).
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.
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.
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.
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.
I eat 3 eggs a day for breakfast, 4+ days a week for the last 25 years.
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.
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?
- Cleanest (High Protein, Low fat)
- 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.