re: PPI again shows signs of cooling

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Food prices have doubled in the past few years.

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Not even remotely close.


Food has barely inflated the past 18ish months. Many food items have been some of the very few items overall that have deflated over that time period.

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The discrepancy between your two views is going to be due to what a person is buying. This is where I think CPI fails in the food category because it doesn't weight its basket of goods with a propensity to be purchased (meaning that pack of kale has the same weight as a pack of soft drinks).

Some of the most purchased items:

Bread Up 31% since it's pre-COVID price, currently down ~2.5% from it's high.

Ground Beef Up 30% since pre-COVID price, currently at its highest recorded average price.

Chicken. Up ~31.5% since pre-COVID price, currently just a smidge off its high.

Eggs Up 53% since its pre-COVID price, currently down 37% from its high but has been trending up since October.

Milk Up 20% from its pre-COVID price, currently down ~5.3% from its high but seems to be holding at that range.

Chocolate Chip Cookies Up ~30% since its pre-COVID price, seems to be holding steady at just a few tenths of a percent below its high.

Soft Drinks Up ~37.5% from its pre-COVID price, seems to be holding around that range (down only very slightly from its high).

Pet Food Up 19.3% from its pre-COVID price, seems to be hanging around that range (down only very slightly from its high).

***high-propensity items like peanut butter, specialty frozen items (dinners, Hot Pockets, etc), soap, etc. have only PPI numbers on FRED***

Going off a list like that is going to give a closer view to what the average consumer is feeling when they check out at the grocery store than CPIs basket of goods. While it's definitely not 2x the price increase and many prices have indeed come down over the last 18 months, the decrease for high-propensity items is so small in many cases as to be unnoticeable (especially when viewed against the backdrop of the rapid and large rise since COVID).

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But your examples make my point.

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I wasn't trying to disprove your point, just show you both why you are in such stark disagreement.

Grocery prices haven't gone up 100%, but an average of a realistic basket of groceries has gone up at least 20%-30% over just 4 years (and hasn't moved much from that). That's a HUGE amount of movement for a basket of groceries.

People in the US are used to (and thus expect) grocery prices to be low, that much increase in such a short amount of time and lasting for so long is going to naturally create exaggerations in the minds of consumers, but the longer it goes on the less it's going to feel like an exaggeration to someone not actually looking into individual prices. This likely gets exacerbated the lower you get in household income (setting aside political bias).