@wyrmeboi Government indexes aside, our buying and products haven’t changed. We’re retired, and I track all expenses over time. Groceries in particular are way up. We shop mostly from the parameter, few packaged/processed foods. We also live in a rural town in CA, with limited choices. Even the eggs we buy from homegrown neighbors went from $4/dozen to $6-7, since their feed cost has gone up so much.
Heck, firewood went from around $400 last fall to $500 a cord this year.
@wyrmeboi And, of course, every video streaming service, our local ISP, Starlink, Amazon, and mobile phones, each up 5-20%. Auto insurance, up 10%. So when I hear inflation is at 3-4%, I have a hard time finding anything we spend money on that’s only gone up by that amount.
Not even touching on “shrinkflation”, where many products we buy have shrunk in size/quantity recently. Like toilet paper and paper towels.
@kay_dub That is the western US consumer price index from the US dept of labor statistics. And lest you think I am cherry picking, I just couldn't source a graph on this time scale for the whole country. But I'm pretty sure it would look like this regardless.