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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This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items!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).
I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025?
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
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.
The Economist tried to solve this in the past with https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index for non-subscribers)
Credit card companies have all of this data. They could track classes of spending and regress out rising incomes, age, etc.
> Thanks to NPR for this important reporting
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?
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.
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62-553-x/2023001/chap-7-...
In the article it says:
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.
I'm not sure if it's a national thing, but Hardees/Carl's Jr Large Cup sizes slowly decreased in volume until they matched the McDonald's Large Cups.
There's been plenty of volume gaming as costs and prices have risen.
I rarely eat pork, but saw some ridiculously cheap bacon at the store last week.
When I got home I noticed it was 12oz instead of the (historical) norm 16oz.
"Pack contains 6 Mega Rolls (224 Sheets Per Roll) of Charmin Ultra Soft Toilet Paper"
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?
In other words: enshitification ensues!
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.
Going out and checking prices independently of official numbers has been thing for a while:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
Generally peer-reviewed papers have shown the official CPI numbers are fairly accurate.
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
That stuff is so bad for you though that raising the price probably decreases the country's total healthcare costs by quite a bit.
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.
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.)
>I can't think of a good explanation for this.
Supply and demand.
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)
If you add a few cents of spices a day, I would argue it's not even too boring af and can even arguably be fairly tasty!
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.
> swai fish fillets from Vietnam (up 34%)
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.
I also wouldn't trust it. Zero real oversight on food quality in VN.
This was really informative!
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.
The companies that got flamed by 1600 Penn were the ones that raised prices without paying the occupant of 1600 Penn a bribe beforehand.
Cue outrage from the conservative administration for checks notes quality journalism.
I'm surprised the US doesn't try doing chocolate growing in some of it's big empty, hot states.
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.
The really empty states lack the water.
would be interesting to reveal the holding company behind each brand and what impact they had on products
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.
A weak economy bodes well for cash infused investors as fire sale prices arise.
I think we’ve crossed a line where we can no longer assume basic alignment with “our” leadership.
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.
The article text cites a comment about ice cream becoming unaffordable.
The numbers show reduced prices for milk and butter (e.g. cream), and sugar remaining constant.
Thus: ice cream is being priced too high.
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.