Comment by mikehearn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikehearn | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

To me, this is at the heart of why Trump won this election. I honestly do not believe your grocery bill has tripled. That's 200% inflation, which is an insane number. The statistics we have are that groceries have gone up ~25%. I have such a hard time imagining any combination of products that would add up to 8x the national inflation average of groceries.

But, I also don't think you're lying. I think you honestly believe your grocery bill tripled, and I think a lot of people have a similar internal impression about how bad inflation got. It's not useful for me (or, for politicians) to try and argue it logically. No one can check your receipts from 2019 and 2024 and say, look, things aren't actually that bad. Dems needed to kind of take it at face value and come up with a solution to something that people feel is real, and they just did not do that.

Editing to add: I might as well add the lowest effort source to the ~25% number, which comes from using the search feature of ChatGPT (sorry). https://chatgpt.com/share/672b7e09-4b58-800e-a3df-58f38c33bc...

What is the 25% figure coming from? Not disputing it, just curious.

Unable to give US equivalents but I think the price increases were pretty significant on the lower end and less so the higher you go up.

Until a few years ago it was possible to get instant ramen noodles for ~15p, you could get 6 eggs for like 80p, baked beans for 20p, etc. All of these things and similar spiked massively very very quickly. There was also a kind of double inflation where a lot of the value offerings seemed to disappear from shelves for an extended period (e.g. I remember a patch of several months where those instant ramen noodles weren't stocked in any supermarket near me at all while the 90p branded version was).

They've actually gone back down somewhat since but what you're looking at is people barely scraping by seeing drastic increases in their grocery bills.

Similar issues occurred with energy costs in the last few years; along with the rates going up the companies drastically bumped up the standing charge so even if you almost cut out all usage entirely you still could wind up seeing an increase.

Aggregate data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

https://www.in2013dollars.com/Food/price-inflation/2019-to-2...

https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/price-of-food

It's closer to 28%. I wrote the initial post from my memory of the stat, which is why I approximated it.

I'm in Canada, but anecdotally, in 2019 I wouldn't buy tomatoes if they were over 0.99/lb . Meanwhile today, I bought some at 2.49/lb, and only see them below 1.99/lb maybe once every 4 mo.

Similarly cucumbers I'd buy at 0.99; now I get them at 1.99 . Those are the ones I personally remember best.

It goes well beyond fresh produce.

Over that time period in Canada, I've also seen a 2 to 3 times increase in the unit price of many other basic grocery items, including dried pasta, rice, bread, canned goods, bags of frozen vegetables (peas, corn), meat, and so on.

The government-reported inflation numbers are well below what I've experienced and what many people in Canada I've talked to have told me they're experiencing.

Assuming you're in a Vancouver, is this true for all the retailers in your area?

In my experience prices are wildly different between grocers for some items.

I shop at whole foods quite a bit for staples. I have grocery receipts from 2019 on the Amazon app so it lets me easily see the difference. Organic canned beans delivered for $.99, now $1.3. Lentils, pasta, etc look about the same. This correlates with the CPI and grocery price numbers I've seen.

2-3x sounds like you are getting robbed. I don't know if it's a locality issue which I mentioned above.. but yeah I haven't seen anything like that in Chicagoland.

Since whole foods and organic food has kind of always been a bit more expensive, I wonder if maybe that didn't see the same rise. My prices are coming from fresh food/store brands from Wal Mart, No Frills, Food Basics mainly.

Actually I wonder if that might account for the discrepancy a lot of people feel between perceived rise and the rise shown in the data. What if the cheapest things have seen a disproportionately large increase, I wonder? That would be hidden when the data averages everything together. But only certain parts of the population, likely those who would feel the impact the most, would notice the increase discrepancy from the reported numbers.

I don't only shop at whole foods. For example I buy all my produce, usually non-organic except greens as they tend to look better, at a local chain. I unfortunately don't have digital receipts for that though looking up print coupon ads from 2019 to now they are about the same prices (these are sales). Bone in pork shoulder $1.50/lb vs $2/lb. Avocados 2/$1 vs 5/$3. 24pk soda $7 vs $10.

Whole foods gets a bad rap for price, but their 365 brand is pretty solid price for non organic goods. E.g. canned beans are $0.10 higher than the store brand of the 'cheap store'. Even things like chips are a good buy at WF. Amazon just has that supply chain advantage I guess.

You definitely have to be mindful where, and how, you shop if you care about price and quality. It's why I mentioned in one of my other comments that basically food deserts are where I'd expect to see these issues. This would align well with the rural vote. A lot of people don't have a choice, where as I have over a dozen.

So yeah I have no doubts the degree varies across certain regions, but that's kind of always expected. In rural areas you'll have higher purchasing power for land but typically less wages and higher price of goods, with lower taxes on those goods.

> I honestly do not believe your grocery bill has tripled.

So much the worse for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com