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Comment by nodja | Hacker News Reader

I'm portuguese and there's an oddity in either this chart or my memory.

When we transitioned to the euro it seemed most shops straight up converted from escudo to eurocent. So if something cost 50 escudos it would cost 50 cents. I was a teen at the time so I remember having to pay double for breakfast and arcade coinop games and people blaming the inflation for the doubled price of stuff. Yet the chart doesn't represent this. I know the price of electronics for example wasn't doubled so I wasn't expect a 100% inflation rate or anything, but I still feels it should've been higher than 4%.

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Ditto in Spanish with the former currency, the peseta.

1 euro = 166 PTS, 6 euro ~ 1000 PTS, the basic banknote.

Guess what happened. Exactly. Bread costing 100 PTS began to cost... 166, 1 euro.

Bread didn’t go up 66% overnight.

It did go up 66%… but it took more than 15 years: https://dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/6407661.pdf

In some places, it did over a year.

In your mind :-)

Tell that to lots of local shops there on what happened between 2002 and 2005 :)

And, of course, bars.

We were talking about bread. And "between 2002 and 2005" is somewhat longer than "over a year".

It didn't happed specifically with bread, as other comment exposed, but it happened with other products, specially in bars, cafés, and restaurants.

On the other hand, inflation affected different products in different ways. I remember how in January 1st 2002 a small bag of Ruffles Jamón costed €0.15 in a kiosk and now it's around €0.50 (or even more) in same places (and now contains less product and more air), and I doubt any other product that are nearly 300% percent inflation since 2002 (outside homes sadly)

Uh 3 years of 22% inflation (give or take) doubles prices. When you're a young kid it sure would seem like everything got twice as expensive really fast, especially since most stores and manufacturers aren't raising prices every week to track inflation.

If I estimate the 10-ish years of 20% +/- 3% that's around 7x which I can't imagine.

They were talking about 2002 when the Euro was introduced and "it felt like" prices doubled overnight. At the time (as you can see in the chart) inflation was below 4% per year.

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