Comment by justinlloyd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justinlloyd | Hacker News Reader

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I have been tracking my household expenses religiously for years. Down to how much we spend on milk each year, or how many boxes of breakfast cereal we go through. And without changing habits (I worked from home previously) or spending any differently for most of 2020 I saw a slight upward tick that was more than I would expect for previous years, about a 10% increase across the board in terms of energy, health care costs, food costs. In 2021 that upward tick turned in to way more than just a tick.

Food habits haven't changed, nor have quantities. I shop at a mixture of Food4Less, Ralphas, Gelsons and a few small items at Whole Foods, but food expenditure has increased by 30% to 40% since start of 2020. Household energy usage has remained the same, but somehow the price is 20%+ higher than at the start of 2020. Monthly health insurance costs have increased by 17.1%

A gallon of milk or a carton of eggs is about where it has been for the past three or four years, because a gallon of milk or a carton of eggs doesn't go up by 3 cents each month, it jumps by a dollar once every three years. Low-end commodities like that tend to stay artificially deflated for a while. I am expecting milk, eggs, and other basics to jump by a dollar or two in the very near future.

I am just a single data point, but something seems "off" with all officially reported statistics. Something isn't being captured somewhere.

Huh, I'm seeing the opposite here. My health insurance premium (Kaiser) went down 5% this year, and dental insurance gave a 1-month "premium holiday" (~8% discount). Granted, that seems also related to "skimpflation", because people made fewer non-emergency visits due to the pandemic and just reduced consumption of medical services, versus individual medical services getting cheaper. But it does still save me money on my own insurance coverage, independently of my own consumption, which adds a bit of a twist.

On other big-ticket items: My rent is exactly same as it was in 2019 (I pay the same rent for the same apartment). My commute (on transit) got a whopping 25% cheaper as they slashed the price of monthly passes. For leisure, the prices of Amtrak tickets, hotels, and AirBnBs are all down a lot, at least in the Northeast, maybe in the range of 30-50%. Fresh groceries are definitely a bit up, that much I agree with. My staple Amazon Subscription orders, though, are flat to slightly down, e.g. La Colombe canned coffee is about 15% down from its 2019 prices (used to be $12/4-pack and is now $10/4-pack).

Overall my cost of living is deflating a moderate amount. I suspect some of the disconnect is that supply/demand has shifted, e.g. cars have gotten more expensive while trains/buses have gotten cheaper. So those effects partly cancel out. I'm not going to argue they fully cancel out, but for me personally I have seen slight deflation.

My Kaiser health insurance is increasing from $1392 to $1563 in December. It is actually a bigger increase this year than last year. My wife and I haven't talked to a Doctor or stepped foot in a hospital in four years.

I have noted increases in many staples on Amazon Subscriptions which include pet food, shampoo, shaving foam, pet treats and so forth. Routine pet medication at the vet has increased around 10% over the course of the year.

Oddly enough our 5lb bags of coffee have stayed the same price for almost 4 years.

Thanks for posting. I'm completely unsurprised.

Do you also happen to have data from before the pandemic? What was the trend then?

I'm surprised by seeing everyone in the whole thread and the article talking about the last two years. The way I see it, both shrinkflation and "skimpflation" were already blindingly obvious way before pandemic, and looking at the stats from the last two years makes reasoning difficult because of, well, a global pandemic.

I have data for household budget going as far back as 1999. Though not everything can be inferred from that data simply because of lifestyle changes, e.g. getting married, moving to different cities, education, and changing dietary habits (cutting sugar, cutting salt, eating out less, consciously choosing less processed foods).

But 2013 to 2019 was a stable period with few lifestyle changes and the trend was around 6% per year for my "basket of household items" with the occasional bumps of "milk just went up by a dollar at the local Food4Less lower tier grocery store." The largest inflationary food items I've seen have been meat and poultry.

The largest non-food inflationary items I've seen are gasoline and health insurance. Car insurance I cannot track due to a minor "at fault" accident adjusting insurance rates in 2018. Storage locker increases by around 4% per year. Household insurance increases by around 5% per year.

My life is only a single, but extensively tracked, data point. But "something seems screwy in the state of Denmark" to paraphrase Shakespeare.

P.S. I'm not in Denmark.

>A gallon of milk or a carton of eggs is about where it has been for the past three or four years, because a gallon of milk or a carton of eggs doesn't go up by 3 cents each month, it jumps by a dollar once every three years.

because it's averaged out across multiple stores across the country?

My guess would be because it is a price that is easy to know, and one that would push shoppers away. I know that a gallon of milk is 4.99 at most grocery stores(where I live in Canada). I don't know off the top of my head the exact price for any of the other things I regularly buy. If I saw a gallon of milk for 5.99 I would assume that I was shopping for groceries at a place that has generally higher prices for all foods. I doubt this is a rational signal, but it is the way that my brain works.

There are maximum prices on a few items like milk in Canada (at least in Quebec).

Note: the regulation targets “basic” milk, not pimped out milk with omega-3, 19g proteins, without lactose etc.

That’s a Quebec thing not a Canada thing.

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