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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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An individual saying "food costs more than it used to" is exactly what inflation is, and exactly what inflation statistics are supposed to measure. If the statistics don't match the experience, then the statistics are wrong.

Not necessarily:

  1. The person might live in a particular geographic location which has particularly bad inflation.
  2. The person might suffer selective outrage, noticing the prices that have risen the most, but ignoring products whose prices have remained flat, and ignoring that if you actually average them all out they do match the government numbers.
  3. The person might have specific shopping habits that don't match those of the average consumer.
  4. The inflation on particular product SKU's often exceeds CPI inflation as corporations try to sneak by price increases on lazy existing customers, while giving discounted prices to new customers. So you see the product list price go up and think high inflation. But maybe you forgot about that time you called your cable company, threatened to cancel, got your SKU slightly changed, and are actually are paying the same as you were three years ago for a bundle that is just as satisfactory. And when you average it all out, the actually increase in what you pay is not as high as the increase in the list price.

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