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Comment by mynameisash | Hacker News Reader

I do a good deal of baking, and I buy a lot of my supplies from Costco. I also have spent a fair amount of time very diligently tracking my family's grocery expenses. (I have a spreadsheet of almost 3 years of just about all groceries we bought.)

In 2019, I picked up 15 dozen eggs for $8.69, and the 5 dozen was $8.99 at that time. (There were times when they didn't stock the 15 dozen, so I had to opt for 5 -- a much more expensive $1.80/dozen but still reasonable.)

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> I picked up 15 dozen eggs for $8.69, and the 5 dozen was $8.99 at that time.

Is there a typo?

No, those numbers are correct.

So in 2019 15 dozen eggs were 30c cheaper than 5 dozen eggs?

Costco is also a special kind of store, where you pay an annual membership to get wholesale-like pricing.

Costco is a bulk grocer. You pay a yearly fee to shop at Costco, and in return you can get extremely good deals on bulk food and items.

Yeah I understand that, I do shop there often. It took me a few re-reads to understand how relatively similar pricing for 15 dozen and 5 dozen eggs in 2019 at the same store helps to compare inflation measurements.

Summer of 2017 in small-ish town Iowa I was buying eggs at Aldi for $0.37/dozen. When I moved to a "large" Iowa town the price was suddenly around $0.55.

I recently went to buy eggs at a higher end store and the only eggs available were cage free, but would have been less expensive than generic eggs.

Since you have done this, are you convinced inflation is what they say it is?

After three years ending ~EOY'19, I stopped tracking all these data. (It turns out combing every grocery store receipt and manually typing, categorizing, and calculating the data takes a lot of time.)

I can't say how my experience tracked or would have tracked inflation, but I can say that even before the pandemic, I did see wildly varying prices on things. Costco's large vanilla extract was once around $10 (though this was before my spreadsheet, so I don't have dates/exact prices). It was up to $35 in '18, then down to $30 a year later, and just a few days ago, I noticed it for a little over $20. But 25# of flour used to be around $6-7, and I bought a bunch the other day for ~$12. So some things up, others down.

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