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.