For example, your store might be competing for business using the headline price of eggs and making it up on milk and bread. In our city, Whole Foods was the cheapest non-warehouse place to buy eggs for a while. Anecdotally, it looks like one could save a relatively large % on various goods simply by going to a different store, which was not the case a few short years ago.
Relative pricing stability appears to have collapsed, shopping is more intellectually-intensive now.
There is no way I could go shop at 5, or even 3 stores a week for food, I simply do not have the time. (Spouse and I both work full-time, 3 kids at 3 different ages going to 3 different schools every day, etc)
I actually do know someone who regularly hits up multiple grocery stores every week chasing deals and that does seem crazy to me. The cost in gas and time doesn't at all seem worth it.
The time saved is enormous, and the amount of money we might be saving by being more scrupulous is probably on the order of 5-10 bucks/week, which granted does add up over the course of a year. I like to think it’s a wash with the gas/car maintenance we would be spending, but who knows how accurate that is.
Works well enough for us, at this stage in life. Walmart is on the very cheap/low quality end of the spectrum, and we cook all our meals/pack lunches.
Always open to new ideas as it relates to saving money and being more efficient with time. These kiddos won’t be kiddos before we know it and we try to optimize our time with them as much as we can.
You have no idea, at all, how much my wife or I travel for work, among many other things about my life. You don't know about any of the myriad of health problems I would have, or my spouse, or my kids. You don't even know if I have a variety of stores at which I could "stop by for 3 hours a week." You don't know my work schedule, or my wifes.
Take a deep breath. I wasn't assuming anything about anyone. You however, are doing that.
You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low.
That 15% cost is not relevant if you don't drink milk. Its also a lot less if you are able to save money. That money saved might be for something very specific like one specific car or a house.
The house market, as far as i understand it, is more decoupled from inflation than not. Here in germany a farm costs still 600k and goes up and down based on location and other factors. My money in the bank doesn't has to be inflation neutral, it should be house market neutral for the money i only want to buy a house for.
You can also choose and change your buying power. Instead of the sports car x, you can buy y. Instead of buying the city center house, you can buy the farm outside.
You are on HN, the chance you are part of the american average is very low.
This is not US politics. Its global politics and it affects me as well. Independent of this, hn is not a platform the avg person is visiting. It requires a certain amount of high tech expertise to understand the conent of hn which statistically pushes the avg hn reader above the avg person.
You do know how much impact the USA has around the globe right? right?!
Its not far fetched.
This place isn't a shibboleth.
Just because you don't drink milk, doesn't mean that you'll be unaffected.
Example report https://mymarketnews.ams.usda.gov/filerepo/sites/default/fil...
but you are more interested in making idiotic snarky comments and feel smug.
I seem to have read an article that states that by the 1980s measure inflation hit 15%. Other alternative measures go the same way, with the famous big mac index crossing 10%.
In Europe, they seem to do the same, but seem more fans of actually falsifying the underlying figures (like the LIBOR incident, which turned out to raise mortgage payment yet lower inflation)
Asian central banks (by which we mean China) do it yet another way. They simply declare inflation, 4 years ahead of time, to be a certain value. Then inflation is that value. Of course, last time "for some reason" the economic measures that made up the definition of inflation were suddenly declared state secrets.
Of course this may just be the banks moving at different speeds. Europe used to fix it's inflation problems by redefining what inflation was. They moved on to falsifying data. I guess that's just what's in the FED's future.
They adopted a new way to adjust inflation in 1990, and since then everything has been perfect lmao: https://www.shadowstats.com/imgs/sgs-cpi.gif?hl=ad&t=
There are many ways in which inflation numbers are cooked; just one of them is the hedonic adjustment [1].
Others include an un-representative basket of goods.
The basket of goods is adjusted every 2 years, but not necessarily in a way that mirrors the way real households adapt their spending patterns to increased prices.
Owner equivalent rent (LOL) massively lags behind home prices.
Honestly, when 10s or hundreds of millions of people's perception does not match *Official Government Numbers*, then it's reason to suspect that the official numbers are a poor metric.
They apply random multipliers to many products to account for "quality" and "performance", it completely skew the numbers and doesn't reflect the life of most people.
They even give you an example showing how the same car but with 3 more speeds, "smartphone integration" and "keyless entry" should be 3.6% inflation but actually counts as 0.6%
Same for computers, mobiles, etc.
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/vehicles.htm
https://www.bls.gov/cpi/factsheets/wireless-telephone-servic...