Next, check what a case of Coke costs and come back and tell me sticker shock isn't a thing.
I live in coastal CA and the cheapest eggs at my local market are $3.49/dozen. Trader Joes and Costco are closer to $2.20/dozen if you just want plain white eggs. The moment you go organic, the cheapest is Costco at about $4/dozen.
Edit: Just to be clear, at Costco you buy 2 dozen rather than 1 and I've divided the price to a single dozen.
> Prices for Offerings you order for delivery or pickup through the Online Grocery Ordering Service may be higher than the prices for such Offerings in our physical stores.
Most outlets I've seen (eg. Target) are the same in that they just list a higher price on the website than it costs in-store and they're upfront about this. It takes me 20-25 minutes of in-store picking to shop including checkout for my weekly groceries. Even if that is done by a minimum wage worker (~$17/hr here) that's ~$6-8 of service on top of them bringing it out to the curb. In addition, eggs are usually specially packed in their own bag (frequently with a sticker on the bag labeled "eggs") when they're bought online and curbsided. It seems a bit naive to me to think that all this service would just be included/free.
[1] https://www.albertsonscompanies.com/policies-and-disclosures... (linked from safeway's footer)
I didn't learn about this in the media... I learned about it in school.
I really don't buy this thing about how things are confusing unless you have already experienced them!
Math tricks; mostly loans with long term repayment obligations to a rent seeker, media obfuscation, have been used to hide the deflation of purchase power
We know where it all went. Warren Buffet said the solution is simple, the people need to demand government raise his taxes.
But the public thinks making $200k in 2024 puts them beyond the $60k/yr their parents made in 1990 so it’s cool
I think a good degree of this problem is political as well. People who hold unfavorable views of their leadership are more likely to think of inflation in cumulative terms, as well as ignoring wage growth.
But this isn't higher education level material, is it? Is this not part of the curriculum in high school? I know it's possible to drop out of high school, but most people finish.
Is "what does the word inflation mean?" really not something that it can be assumed everyone has been taught?
If you did, think back on all the kids that were your classmates. Not just the ones in the honors and AP courses you probably took, but all of them. Do you really find it surprising that they didn't learn or retain various bits of seemingly simple information?
If you went to some kind of magnet school with only the smart kids, take my word for it - a huge percentage of 14-17 year olds have absolutely no interest in learning and remembering what inflation is and how it works. Some of them will find some internal curiosity later in life, but plenty will never change much.
This is a minor pet peeve of mine developed from too much time spent reading internet comments years ago where young people would complain "why wasn't XYZ taught in school??". Very often the answer is - It was, but you were a bad student.
There is not some ideal price level that prices fluctuate around such that they are "low" when beneath that level, and "high" when above it. That's just not a thing, it's not how economies work.
So what do you mean when you say "price levels are high"? I think what you and I and most people mean when we say this sort of thing is something like, "I have an estimate anchored in my mind for what the prices of things are, and they are currently noticeably higher than that". But where do those price level "anchors" we all have in our minds come from? From recent experience, pretty much.
But by introducing "recent experience" into this, we now have a time component. And that's where inflation - the change in price levels over time - comes in. This is why people immediately start talking about inflation when you say "price levels are high". It just doesn't make sense to talk about price levels without a baseline to compare to, and that is inevitably a comparison between price levels at different times, so now we're talking about a change over time, which means we're talking about inflation, not just price level.
So what I think people really mean by a statement like "price levels are high" is something like "price levels have increased faster than I have mentally updated the price levels I'm anchored on". That is, there is some rate of inflation that gets lost in the noise of our mental estimates over time, but at some point, it becomes noticeable. (And of course this happens at a different point for different people and those people have difference "noise" tolerance across different things they buy.)
Using everyone's favorite bad example of egg prices, if they cost $3 one year, am I going to notice if they cost a nickel or a dime more the next year? That's about 2% to 3% inflation, and no, I'm probably not going to notice; they still cost about $3. But if inflation is closer to 20% for that year, now they cost $3.60, and that's starting to feel more like $4, which is way more!
Then the other thing is that I think maybe we actually should be reporting inflation in longer time horizons. Something I think I've learned from this period is that people don't update these mental "anchors" for price levels symmetrically; we notice more quickly when prices go up a lot, and take longer than that to "get used to" the new level. So maybe it's a 3 year comparison or even a 5 year comparison that would better reflect how people feel about price levels.
For instance, we could say "the 5-year inflation is at about 23%, which is about 4% annualized", or "3-year inflation is at about 16%, which is about 5% annualized". Importantly, you can't directly compare the 5-year number to the 3-year number, only the annualized rates are comparable, but you can see how the long-range numbers each evolve over time. For instance, the 5-year inflation in 2020 was just 9.2% (using this calculator[0] for all of these), which is only 1.74% annualized! This is a huge difference from the current numbers, and I think that has a lot to do with how people are feeling about price levels.
To complicate it even further, I think how people really anchor things - though this is useless for baseline comparisons over time - is not on a fixed time-range, but instead based on the most recent major event, like the pandemic, or the "great recession" before that, or 9/11 before that, etc. You can see that in most of the current discussions on this, where the word "pandemic" pretty much always comes up. We're coming up on 5 years since that, so I think the 5-year inflation comparison captures it well, but we may still be anchoring on price levels from before the pandemic another three or five years from now if that's still the big event we all have in our minds (and I certainly hope we don't have a new one to dislodge it anytime soon...).
Like, if I bought a house 10 years ago for $50k (which I actually did), paying off $50k with today's dollars seems like no big deal compared to yesterday's dollars. $50k today buys a new car, not a (admittedly on the inexpensive end even at the time) new house.
If the prices of other things are growing a lot faster than the interest rate I got on that house (which I'd think of as the expected time value of that money over the life of the mortgage), it makes sems that the prices are "high" relative to that expectation.
I think something similar happens on the scale of the national debt. Adding a trillion dollars now isn't nearly as big a deal as adding a trillion dollars the first time, because "prices are high" for both labor and goods (income and expenses, from the average citizen's perspective).
My monthly groceries are slightly more expensive than during the pandemic and roughly 3x higher than pre pandemic.
My rent also went way up because the house I’m renting has more than doubled in value over the past few years.
Rent, groceries, and childcare accounts for close to 75% of my post taxes income.
I make well over double the national average, and if I have trouble saving for a house I have no clue how everyone else is managing.
I believe your grocery bill went up that much during the period of inflation, though it's a bit higher than the aggregate inflation data nationwide, it's not too far off.
But that doesn't tell us anything about how quickly prices are rising now, which is what "inflation" is.
Saying "prices are higher now than they were in the past" is not the same as saying "inflation is high right now". And both statements are entirely meaningless without defining the time period being discussed.
We could have massive deflation month to month, and it would still be the case that prices are many times higher than they were in the 50s. It's just an apples to oranges comparison that provides no insight.
Inflation is typically reported on either by looking at the previous 12 months, or by looking at the previous month and "annualizing" it (calculating what the result would be of 12 repetitions of that month's rate).
But clearly people's anchoring on price levels is not all that well aligned with that. I'm also still anchored on what I think things should cost based on what they cost "before the pandemic".
But eventually we'll all get used to the new price levels, and our kids will laugh about how there used to be a whole "dollar menu" at fast food restaurants, just like we laugh about the idea of "nickel and dime stores" and only paying "two bits" (which is a quarter, for some reason) for a shave and a haircut.
But the question of how long this period of getting used to new price levels requires, and why, is fascinating, and I'd like to read a good book about it :)
(Edit to add: I ignored the house and childcare price aspects of this, and I fundamentally agree that it's the "one of these things is not like the others" that explains a lot of the dissatisfaction that people - especially younger people and people with young kids - are feeling.)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=when+did+the+covid-19+pandemic+end...
...seems to indicate that plenty of authorities considered the pandemic emergency over in the May 2023 time-frame.
Most people only care about having enough money to achieve their life goals. Have a family, own a home, whatever.
People are upset about inflation because costs went way up and salaries stagnated.
Even though inflation is leveling off, many industries are experiencing layoffs, forgoing raises and promotions, etc.
Costs (profits) have gone way up but the average income has not.