Thanks to NPR for this important reporting; it sucks that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down after losing all of its funding.
This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items! It seems to me like there must be organizations out there with tons and tons of price and consumer spending data for thousands and thousands of items, right? It should be possible to get much more comprehensive measurement of price changes over time vs and approach taken like this one (or the CPI, for that matter).
1. It sounds like you're just describing a larger "basket of goods"? That data is available, but also valuable, and I'm not sure why the basket of goods tracked by the CPI or NPR would be inadequate.
2. This specific exercise is designed to be relatable to individuals (in general, and specifically ones such as the people interviewed in the article who claimed that their grocery bill went up about 50% in a year, which is implausible to put it politely) so that they can understand the actual level of inflation rather than the one they imagined in their head.
It's fascinating to see such work. By the grace of NPR, apparently the "transient inflation" narrative is officially inoperative, and plebian concerns about the price of eggs are now worthy!
The physical size of charmin changed during the pandemic.
Good to track this yearly since some standard metrics are useless versus the shrinkflation, reduction in quality ingredients, and other manipulation we’ll learn about sooner or later.
Many ice creams are now dairy desserts due to not having enough ingredients to make the cut. Same with milk chocolates and now declared chocolate candy due to not using enough real cocoa.
> The physical size of charmin changed during the pandemic.
This is generlly taken into account. From StatCan, who publishes Canada's CPI numbers:
> 7.10 Quantity adjustment entails accounting for changes in the quantity (e.g. package size, number of tissue ply, etc.) of observed POs. This is another implicit method of quality adjustment because it is assumed that the quality per standardized unit is the same over time.
> 7.11 Quantity adjustment is the default treatment for nearly all of the POs in the food major aggregate as well as some of the products in the household operations, and personal care supplies and equipment aggregates.
To account for possible changes in package sizes, we focused on the price per unit, whether it was an ounce of salsa or a square foot of aluminum foil.
At least Walmart is likely to honor the price on the shelf. Dollar stores often just change prices without updating the shelf, so you don't know what you're going to pay until you get to the register. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
This is illegal in the UK (and we aren't even talking about the hidden tax surprise at US registers either), unsurprising to see it's normalised in the US.
the price of name brand soda is outrageous. I remember when it was around a dollar a bottle not long ago, now it's basically 3 dollars a bottle. I can't think of a good explanation for this. It's water and subsidized corn syrup.
They're pricing at the point of pain, not maximizing efficiency. There are few enough companies (what, like, 3?) that own the majority of the brands so they don't even need to collude to figure out that they can all hover around "as high as we can get away with" together.
I've been nursing a minor Coke Zero addiction for years but usually get the store brand which is close enough at half the cost. For whatever reason Coke Zero itself dropped in price by about 30% recently but that's apparently not nationwide.
It really kind of blows my mind how much of that people drink. I'll get a 2 liter bottle that will last days and then I read about people going through entire cases of Mountain Dew Insane Flavor Combo Super Bacinator Blast in a day and it's like my god that's like 4000 kcals of corn syrup.
It's totally "because they can". Even if you take marketing budgets into account I can't imagine it costs that much more to make a 2l of Diet Coke vs the store brands which still sell for $1 where I live
The thing with inflation is that a product's individual components may cost the same or less over time, but the cost of everything else...like housing...doubles every couple of years. So you need to increase prices to support higher salaries, increasing minimum wage, etc. It's rides the line of becoming run away inflation since everyone needs to raise prices to support COL, then everything gets more expensive, then they need to raise prices again to support everything else getting more expensive. It's a loop that will never be closed
I buy soda syrup to make soda, but even that's gotten expensive. Funny thing is that I do it to reduce how much I was putting in recycling, but even with the extra state tax for bottles/cans, it actually costs me slightly more to make it myself.
I've had great results making my own mineral water clones though, so maybe I'll try making LabCoatz's coca cola clone syrup and see how it works with sucrolose or allulose.
If you're buying individual bottles, you're paying for the refrigerator. Otherwise you buy boxes and it's still very cheap. Spindrift is $6.49 for an eight-pack and LaCroix is cheaper. I haven't bought Coke in a long time, sorry.
It was intentional price gouging, but prices have become to come down after shareholders pressured CEOs to lower the prices in response to tepid sales numbers.
We're really sorely missing something like "semver for food".
I don't have deep food industry knowledge, IIRC there are some rules around SKUs needing to rotate in response to certain changes, but these are completely opaque to customers. People should know they're eating snickers 12.2.2, and while a sub-1% change to one ingredient's amount might be a patch bump, a 10% total weight reduction should absolutely trigger a major version bump. SKU and nutrition labels should be tied to a public changelog, and inaccuracies in that changelog should proportionally imperil manufacturer solvency.
FWIW, a frugal person can't simply think to eat whatever has declined in price... It's worth realizing that, for example, a 20% rise on the 0.33 ramen is still one of your cheapest options.
From my perspective (ie, in the USA) it can still be hella cheap if you're willing to cook food yourself from scratch. Rice, Beans, Lentils, and frozen veggies can give you the baseline of very nutritious meals (but boring af) for like $2 a day.
you can eat (all dry/unprepared weight) 100g white rice, 100g black beans, 100g black lentils, 225g frozen mixed veggies for about $1 if you buy in small bulk (like 2-5lbs at a time)
I love this quote from Walmart describing loss leaders turned inside out.
A store, for example, might ... charge slightly more for several items in order to sell something else at a break-even price or even below cost.
Imagine,
Alice: "I think we can sell this plastic gizmo for 1000% markup"
Bob: "Wonderful, we can use those profits to lower prices on things people need!"
Swai is perhaps the worst possible fish to buy (low nutritional value, bad for environment, contains toxins) so (a) it's unfortunate they picked this fish and (b) it's good it's more expensive since perhaps people will buy less of it.
A recent job loss forced me to look harder at my own financials, and I was surprised just how much things like groceries accounts for in overall spending. I'm making a habit this year of, at the end of each day, recording what I spent and on what - so I can get better data.
I appreciate what NPR did here. Taking into account price per ounce/square foot/etc is essential so I'm glad they did.
It's useful to see these kinds of changes, can help make decisions. If company X is shrinking product Y, maybe it's time to look for an off-brand instead? That's what I'll be doing for a lot of things.
It would be interesting to see inflation indexes based on different typical buyers, to include the ultra rich. Basically, inflation isn't uniform and impacts people differently. Of course that brings up how you actually measure the impact of inflation to the ultra rich when the price of corn flakes is meaningless and their personal purchase are negligible. Maybe you look at how much the cost to buy a politician has gone up?
> As affordability became Americans' top concern, big brands began to worry about shoppers switching to store-label competitors or skipping some purchases altogether.
I think, at least in the last year-or-so, big brands also became worried about getting flamed by the president for raising prices.
In general, if there's enough water to grow chocolate, then a relatively hot, empty state chooses to build single-family housing developments and five-lane roads.
What a poorly-built site. There is a cookie banner covering a popover solicitation for donations, covering an inset photo/caption which itself is covered by a cookie banner (wtf?) ... closed the tab.
It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people thought the president would make any really impact on inflation. That said, with global conditions improving it looks like we could've actually seen a drastically larger reduction in inflation if not for the tariffs. The goals of the tariffs seem so misaligned with what the country needs - again not surprising that we're doing something the opposite of what we need - and again also not surprising that his supporters don't seem to care.
I think the real issue is that for the powers that be, inflation is seen as either neutral or a good thing. The only people it hurts is the working class and the blame is nebulous. So it is used as a tool to increase taxes without changing laws, lower the cost of debt, and cut labor wages since they don't get pay raises commensurate with inflation. So I think it is a trick played upon the working class to screw them over in the long term while the wealthy are protected because all their assets simply go up in value with inflation. I think the target inflation rate should be 0%, not 2%. I simply don't believe the justification for the 2% target.
>It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people thought the president would make any really impact on inflation
Except that a president, in normal times, COULD make an impact on inflation, both directly and indirectly.
What is surprising, is that after a completely failed presidency that saw a marked decrease in middle class prosperity, people thought that Donald Trump, of all people, could bring inflation down.
For the love of god- I can't understand why people buy paper towels. It makes zero sense. It's expensive, you throw it after a use. I started using cloth towels and life is so much better.
I don't use them frequently, but I love them for some things. In particular, my wife likes our cloths to look nice. This means wiping up something staining will make the cloths look worse. In those cases I pull out a paper towel. I could get black cloths to get around this, but she doesn't like those. So, here we are.
They're also useful when I need to use a harsh chemical that I don't want lingering on a household cloth my young kids might use on their bodies.
I've had the same roll for around a year, but it's almost exhausted. I think they're fine.
They're also very useful in a lab setting, but that's another matter.
We stopped using toilet paper during covid, got a bidet, and bought a couple hundred shop towels to dry our butts. Now we only buy toilet paper for guests, which happens maybe once a year after throwing several parties.
Then we also bought shop towels for the kitchen to replace paper towels. I love the shop towels so much.
The butt-towels are white, and we wash them with bleach, there's been zero problems doing this over the last ~6 years. If there happens to be a bit of excess poop on a towel (typically there is none at all), we just throw it out, we have hundreds. The kitchen towels are blue, so we don't mix them up with the butt-towels.
We have laundry baskets for each kind of shop towel. A small one in the bathrooms, a larger one in the kitchen for the kitchen towels. We have to wash the butt-towels maybe once a month, and about the same for the kitchen towels. It's a simple chore that takes practically none of our time, less than it would to go out and buy paper. No, the butt-towels do not smell at all, they dry quickly and there's never been any problem whatsoever.
It's so much better than spending multiple $100s of dollars a year on paper that literally gets flushed down the toilet or goes into the trash.
A few of our friends took notice and started doing this too.
Honestly, I don't know why we ever wiped our butts with toilet paper for so many years, it's just so... shitty. It's just not a good experience. When we travel we miss our bidet and shop towels so much, to the point that I've ordered a cheap bidet if I'm staying in an Airbnb for a week or more, and install it there, and leave it behind. $30 well spent.
If you try it at home you'll realise combining milk, butter and sugar in a bowl doesn't create ice cream. And when you figure out how to create ice cream you'll realise moving said ice cream to a place where you can sell it requires extra steps too
First, I think you're probably right that ice cream is priced too high compared to its inputs.
But maybe there are other factors? What about energy? One would assume that ice cream has a higher energy requirement than other "treat" style products? Are there specific tariff impacts on ice cream manufacturing equipment?
Could be. But also, ice cream manufacturers buy their ingredients more cheaply than consumers do. It is very possible that the cost of milk/butter/sugar at Walmart reflect Walmart deciding to lower their profit margins on these items, even if the cost to Walmart has increased.
Or - Walmart is a big enough supplier that they have stable contracts with manufacturers, and are able to purchase their ingredients for the same cost as always, while Turkey Hill et al is competing over what's left. (Like Apple, buying up TSMC runs.)
Ice cream is being priced too high if the ice cream sellers would make more money by decreasing the price of ice cream. If they wouldn't, it is appropriately priced.
Or, from the buyer's perspective, it is priced appropriately if the total amount buyers would spend on it would go down if the price is lowered or raised.
There isn't a correct intrinsic price that an object should be sold at that can be calculated based on the ingredients and labor. That idea is one of the fundamental flaws of Marxism. Price is a compromise between the buyers and sellers, based on the values of each.
Wages and energy have not increased. Tariffs on food are basically non existent for most items.
It's 100% purely supply side pricing, propped up by government spending and credit (which is largely backstopped by the government as well).
I listened to a podcast recently that some 'homeowners' have not made a mortgage payment in years, have no ability to pay, but here are essentially unlimited 'no doc' mortgage modifications available since the Corona time period.
> listened to a podcast recently that some 'homeowners' have not made a mortgage payment in years, have no ability to pay,
How? Somebody is holding the bag here on the mortgage - a bank, probably. And they are fine with not receiving payments? Or is somebody else making payments on the homeowner's behalf?
jrussino|1 month ago
This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items! It seems to me like there must be organizations out there with tons and tons of price and consumer spending data for thousands and thousands of items, right? It should be possible to get much more comprehensive measurement of price changes over time vs and approach taken like this one (or the CPI, for that matter).
darth_avocado|1 month ago
There needs to be an index that reflects what people really need and the closest I’ve found is the ALICE index: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
bpt3|1 month ago
2. This specific exercise is designed to be relatable to individuals (in general, and specifically ones such as the people interviewed in the article who claimed that their grocery bill went up about 50% in a year, which is implausible to put it politely) so that they can understand the actual level of inflation rather than the one they imagined in their head.
tclancy|1 month ago
queuebert|1 month ago
topspin|1 month ago
It's fascinating to see such work. By the grace of NPR, apparently the "transient inflation" narrative is officially inoperative, and plebian concerns about the price of eggs are now worthy!
Will wonders never cease?
hoofhearted|1 month ago
instagib|1 month ago
Good to track this yearly since some standard metrics are useless versus the shrinkflation, reduction in quality ingredients, and other manipulation we’ll learn about sooner or later.
Many ice creams are now dairy desserts due to not having enough ingredients to make the cut. Same with milk chocolates and now declared chocolate candy due to not using enough real cocoa.
throw0101d|1 month ago
This is generlly taken into account. From StatCan, who publishes Canada's CPI numbers:
> 7.10 Quantity adjustment entails accounting for changes in the quantity (e.g. package size, number of tissue ply, etc.) of observed POs. This is another implicit method of quality adjustment because it is assumed that the quality per standardized unit is the same over time.
> 7.11 Quantity adjustment is the default treatment for nearly all of the POs in the food major aggregate as well as some of the products in the household operations, and personal care supplies and equipment aggregates.
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62-553-x/2023001/chap-7-...
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/62-553-X
snake42|1 month ago
To account for possible changes in package sizes, we focused on the price per unit, whether it was an ounce of salsa or a square foot of aluminum foil.
Supermancho|1 month ago
There's been plenty of volume gaming as costs and prices have risen.
apercu|1 month ago
When I got home I noticed it was 12oz instead of the (historical) norm 16oz.
Kye|1 month ago
to
"MEGA ROLLS, MEGA VALUE: Pack contains 6 Mega Rolls (208 Sheets Per Roll) of Charmin Ultra Soft Toilet Paper"
Everyone saw that coming when they changed roll sizes and reframed it, right?
yard2010|1 month ago
smallerize|1 month ago
lavezzi|1 month ago
throw0101d|1 month ago
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
Generally peer-reviewed papers have shown the official CPI numbers are fairly accurate.
steviedotboston|1 month ago
reincarnate0x14|1 month ago
I've been nursing a minor Coke Zero addiction for years but usually get the store brand which is close enough at half the cost. For whatever reason Coke Zero itself dropped in price by about 30% recently but that's apparently not nationwide.
It really kind of blows my mind how much of that people drink. I'll get a 2 liter bottle that will last days and then I read about people going through entire cases of Mountain Dew Insane Flavor Combo Super Bacinator Blast in a day and it's like my god that's like 4000 kcals of corn syrup.
Rebelgecko|1 month ago
thatfrenchguy|1 month ago
vinyl7|1 month ago
Aloisius|1 month ago
I've had great results making my own mineral water clones though, so maybe I'll try making LabCoatz's coca cola clone syrup and see how it works with sucrolose or allulose.
scythe|1 month ago
ComputerGuru|1 month ago
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pepsico-cut-prices-eliminate-...
(The link is for PepsiCo but we all know that they all raised their prices together and will lower their prices together.)
blell|1 month ago
Supply and demand.
RickS|1 month ago
I don't have deep food industry knowledge, IIRC there are some rules around SKUs needing to rotate in response to certain changes, but these are completely opaque to customers. People should know they're eating snickers 12.2.2, and while a sub-1% change to one ingredient's amount might be a patch bump, a 10% total weight reduction should absolutely trigger a major version bump. SKU and nutrition labels should be tied to a public changelog, and inaccuracies in that changelog should proportionally imperil manufacturer solvency.
maerF0x0|1 month ago
From my perspective (ie, in the USA) it can still be hella cheap if you're willing to cook food yourself from scratch. Rice, Beans, Lentils, and frozen veggies can give you the baseline of very nutritious meals (but boring af) for like $2 a day.
you can eat (all dry/unprepared weight) 100g white rice, 100g black beans, 100g black lentils, 225g frozen mixed veggies for about $1 if you buy in small bulk (like 2-5lbs at a time)
morcus|1 month ago
irthomasthomas|1 month ago
zeroonetwothree|1 month ago
Swai is perhaps the worst possible fish to buy (low nutritional value, bad for environment, contains toxins) so (a) it's unfortunate they picked this fish and (b) it's good it's more expensive since perhaps people will buy less of it.
latchkey|1 month ago
instagib|1 month ago
[deleted]
Night_Thastus|1 month ago
A recent job loss forced me to look harder at my own financials, and I was surprised just how much things like groceries accounts for in overall spending. I'm making a habit this year of, at the end of each day, recording what I spent and on what - so I can get better data.
I appreciate what NPR did here. Taking into account price per ounce/square foot/etc is essential so I'm glad they did.
It's useful to see these kinds of changes, can help make decisions. If company X is shrinking product Y, maybe it's time to look for an off-brand instead? That's what I'll be doing for a lot of things.
jmward01|1 month ago
jimt1234|1 month ago
I think, at least in the last year-or-so, big brands also became worried about getting flamed by the president for raising prices.
NickC25|1 month ago
bradhe|1 month ago
trebligdivad|1 month ago
watersb|1 month ago
The really empty states lack the water.
thegreatpeter|1 month ago
amatecha|1 month ago
kenjackson|1 month ago
seiferteric|1 month ago
_factor|1 month ago
I think we’ve crossed a line where we can no longer assume basic alignment with “our” leadership.
NickC25|1 month ago
Except that a president, in normal times, COULD make an impact on inflation, both directly and indirectly.
What is surprising, is that after a completely failed presidency that saw a marked decrease in middle class prosperity, people thought that Donald Trump, of all people, could bring inflation down.
chasd00|1 month ago
foobarian|1 month ago
[deleted]
robthebrew|1 month ago
[deleted]
dwa3592|1 month ago
steve_adams_86|1 month ago
They're also useful when I need to use a harsh chemical that I don't want lingering on a household cloth my young kids might use on their bodies.
I've had the same roll for around a year, but it's almost exhausted. I think they're fine.
They're also very useful in a lab setting, but that's another matter.
leptons|1 month ago
We stopped using toilet paper during covid, got a bidet, and bought a couple hundred shop towels to dry our butts. Now we only buy toilet paper for guests, which happens maybe once a year after throwing several parties.
Then we also bought shop towels for the kitchen to replace paper towels. I love the shop towels so much.
The butt-towels are white, and we wash them with bleach, there's been zero problems doing this over the last ~6 years. If there happens to be a bit of excess poop on a towel (typically there is none at all), we just throw it out, we have hundreds. The kitchen towels are blue, so we don't mix them up with the butt-towels.
We have laundry baskets for each kind of shop towel. A small one in the bathrooms, a larger one in the kitchen for the kitchen towels. We have to wash the butt-towels maybe once a month, and about the same for the kitchen towels. It's a simple chore that takes practically none of our time, less than it would to go out and buy paper. No, the butt-towels do not smell at all, they dry quickly and there's never been any problem whatsoever.
It's so much better than spending multiple $100s of dollars a year on paper that literally gets flushed down the toilet or goes into the trash.
A few of our friends took notice and started doing this too.
Honestly, I don't know why we ever wiped our butts with toilet paper for so many years, it's just so... shitty. It's just not a good experience. When we travel we miss our bidet and shop towels so much, to the point that I've ordered a cheap bidet if I'm staying in an Airbnb for a week or more, and install it there, and leave it behind. $30 well spent.
dsr_|1 month ago
The numbers show reduced prices for milk and butter (e.g. cream), and sugar remaining constant.
Thus: ice cream is being priced too high.
lm28469|1 month ago
quietsegfault|1 month ago
But maybe there are other factors? What about energy? One would assume that ice cream has a higher energy requirement than other "treat" style products? Are there specific tariff impacts on ice cream manufacturing equipment?
infecto|1 month ago
bpt3|1 month ago
That's the implication of your comment.
fwip|1 month ago
Or - Walmart is a big enough supplier that they have stable contracts with manufacturers, and are able to purchase their ingredients for the same cost as always, while Turkey Hill et al is competing over what's left. (Like Apple, buying up TSMC runs.)
binary132|1 month ago
snake42|1 month ago
jandrese|1 month ago
kbelder|1 month ago
Or, from the buyer's perspective, it is priced appropriately if the total amount buyers would spend on it would go down if the price is lowered or raised.
There isn't a correct intrinsic price that an object should be sold at that can be calculated based on the ingredients and labor. That idea is one of the fundamental flaws of Marxism. Price is a compromise between the buyers and sellers, based on the values of each.
linuxftw|1 month ago
It's 100% purely supply side pricing, propped up by government spending and credit (which is largely backstopped by the government as well).
I listened to a podcast recently that some 'homeowners' have not made a mortgage payment in years, have no ability to pay, but here are essentially unlimited 'no doc' mortgage modifications available since the Corona time period.
tomjakubowski|1 month ago
How? Somebody is holding the bag here on the mortgage - a bank, probably. And they are fine with not receiving payments? Or is somebody else making payments on the homeowner's behalf?