> Prices are collected each month in 75 urban areas across the country from about 6,000 housing units and approximately 22,000 retail establishments (department stores, supermarkets, hospitals, and other types of stores and service establishments). [...] Prices of most goods and services are obtained by personal visit, telephone call, web, or app collection by the Bureau's trained representatives.

The BLS does document their process in detail on their FAQ [0].

This might not match your experience because your family doesn't shop the same basket of goods the families the BLS surveyed do. There are also regional variations in the prices of goods. Even store prices in the same region vary. All of these variations get averaged out.

This is why you can't extrapolate from n=1.

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm

Yes. I get that these metrics aren't always measuring the world from the view of a real person. But my income over the last few years has been tied to the official interest rate while my spending habits have stayed the same. Yet I've gone from socking away a bit every month to starting to cut back a bit as I was winding up negative every month. At least for this single person's anecdata, the official inflation rate is much lower than my real life inflation rate.

> Where are they shopping that prices have only risen 3.7% YoY? That does not match neither my grocery bill inflation nor product shrinkflation.

All-items was 3.7%. That does not mean components with-in the overall rate were also 3.7%. Particular components may have gone up more that the overall rate, but only a fraction of that is part of the all-items that is seen in the headlines.

Further, if your personal basket of goods is most likely different than the average basket of goods mix, so your personal inflation rate will be different from the headline number. StatCan, who does the CPI for Canada, actually has a tool for finding out your personal inflation rate based on your purchases:

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...

If you're prepared for a bit of a rabbit hole you can look at https://www.shadowstats.com/ which was allegedly the result of airline econometrics predictive model stopping working and that spurred someone to figure out what was going on.

The idea that the government would cook the books in their favor isn't outside the realm of possibility. The idea that it's been happening for 40+ years is worrying.

They are shopping at a place with hedonic adjustment.

Have they? Or is that just your vague sense of things?

There's lots of data out there, for example: https://prices.marketreportblog.com

_Maybe_ (didn't check) this is tampered by things like housing, which is a huge part of spend but hasn't risen as much as groceries (thankfully)?

they call it "market basket" inflation. If eggs go up 20% and steak goes up 3%, inflation is recorded as 3% because obviously people will choose steak over eggs this year. Then next year, if steak goes up by 20% and eggs go up by 3%, inflation is recorded as 3% because obviously people will choose eggs over steak this year. This way, inflation is recorded as 6% even though everything costs 25% more; the governace gets to pat themselves on the back in the Bahamas with their piles of cash while the proles are left dumbfounded and starving.

I thought the same a bit too. My conjecture is that people working in tech usually live a high-growth area, and tend to experience much higher inflation due to local growth. This also explains why younger people tend to be hitted more