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This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items!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).
The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly:
I think the ALICE index is great for tracking pure essentials and survivability, which is definitely important, but it's also not unreasonable to track things that aren't 100% essential.
My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.
Absolutely. You need both. The point I’m trying to make is that we only have CPI which drives most policy decisions. However when you need about $40k to just survive and 1/3 of the households make less than $50k before taxes, you also need something like this to make effective policy decisions. Social security payments are a great example. If you adjust them only based on CPI, and essentials get more expensive at a higher rate than non essentials, you create a system where over a period of time, social security payments would barely cover the essentials.
People could save so much money if they bought used instead of new more often, especially toys. It's crazy how much garbage we produce basically just because we literally don't share our toys.
I have come away from Christmas with almost the opposite conclusion. I have 3 young kids, and I notice almost an inverse correlation between the number of toys around and how contently they play.
The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.
> Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.
1/3 of the households make less than $50k. Mean survival budget is $35k-40k. After taxes, if a third of the population can barely meet a survival budget, an index like this needs to be part of the overall economy.
And the point of the ALICE index is exactly to address what you are pointing out. When wages, social security etc. were increasing proportionally to the essential goods, it made sense to have the CPI include other goods and services, allowing policy makers to use it as a basis for policy directions. However, when essentials become expensive faster than non essentials, it creates a problem for policy makers. It explains the “vibeflation” where policy makers were pushing back hard on economic struggles that most people are feeling by pointing to CPI numbers that show a 2-3% inflation, meanwhile people are struggling and dipping into savings to make things work.
Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. Consumer spending can therefore easily look great while most people are struggling to get by. There really is no “overall economy”, there are many many different stories happening all at once, and focusing on simple metrics lets you easily fool yourself.
> Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending.
It means increasingly focusing on the spending of the rich, because the population is increasingly richer. Proportion of families making more that 150k (in 2024 dollars) has gone from 5% in 1967 to 33% in 2024, while both middle class (50k-150k) and poor (<50k) have decreased. [1]
Great example. The population as a whole is richer like you say, and also the richest 10% account for half of consumer spending, compared to 36% 30 years ago. [1] So yes, consuming spending has become more of a metric of the wealthy’s spending habits.
No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to measure the cost of entertainment in terms of monetary inflation though. Hugely price-tiered status-signaling goods like kids toys just don't respond to market forces in the same way commodities do.
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 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.
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.
It doesn't say that they accounted for possible changes in item quality. Tide detergent claims that their new 80-oz bottle of laundry detergent can wash 64 loads just like the previous 100-oz bottle because it's more concentrated, and I suppose NPR (if they'd retained a sample of the previous product) could have brought that to a chemistry lab to test and verify that claim, but I have no idea how you'd objectively prove that an ounce of salsa had truly remained the same product.
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...
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.
> how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases
One confounding factor here is that oftentimes the price is only reasonable in bulk. I don't know about walmart, but around me the best deal typically is "buy 2 get 3 free". I rarely buy/drink soda, but on the occasions I buy at all I'll be getting many cases at a time.
More importantly it is a significant source of calories. My brother quit soda years ago when he realized he was getting 1/3 of his daily calories from sugar - a little sugar is okay but you can't meet your daily nutrient needs when that much is from sugar. If it is just liquid soda is just as others (and probably better than alcohol), but there are other considerations.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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?
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.
> 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.
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?
So, the basic process is 1) Borrow stops making payments. 2) Borrow goes into forbearance for 12 months just prior to foreclosure start. 3) Forbearance ends, borrower cannot make current. 4) FHA steps in to do loan modification. Essentially, they roll the forebeared balance into the loan, payoff the existing mortgage, and issue a new FHA-backed loan, without any income or payment ability qualifications. 5) Repeat the process again.
Yeah, those are some of the programs I was referring to. The 'loophole' aspect that was mentioned on the podcast is that when the FHA does the 'loss mitigation' (aka, refi's the loan), there is not any kind of qualification as to whether the buyer will ever be able to make a payment on the new loan. It's just approved anyway, and the cycle can happen unlimited times.
I think they're looking at adding a means test, but I'm unsure.
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.
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.
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.
We're well above 2% anyway, I doubt they will ever hit that again - they are already having to cut rates because job market is frozen, and that will increase inflation pressure.
I track my spend each year and my personal actual inflation rate has averaged about 4.5% over past 5 years. And I'm pretty low income, my spending is all core stuff.
>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.
Ask more widely. People want reasonable services from their government, and tighter regulation of markets, with elimination of profit-taking middlemen.
They want democratic socialism.
Meanwhile, the right wing has been telling them that public libraries and public schools and everything good except profit -- is communism.
> People want reasonable services from their government
Yes, though the definition of "reasonable" is a real sticking point
> and tighter regulation of markets
This is less clear to me, but I would agree people want less fraud and deception in markets
> with elimination of profit-taking middlemen
I don't think many people think about this at all, and it's another very nebulous term
> They want democratic socialism.
No, democratic socialists want democratic socialism. Most Americans do not.
> Meanwhile, the right wing has been telling them that public libraries and public schools and everything good except profit -- is communism.
I disagree with basically everything the current incarnation of the Republican party is doing or stands for, and silly statements like this aren't helpful.
People don't "essentially want communism" by advocating for socialist policy. Serious economists will tell you that it is impossible to transition America's free market into a planned economy. We're capitalist through thick and thin.
Yet there is a sizeable number of us who consider seriously promises to "lower prices of X" like it's a thing that can be done by decree. It's disappointing is all.
it's about the dream of being able to have capital though, not actually about having capital. most people do not like the idea of a death tax even though most people will never have enough wealth where it would matter.
Exactly, people didn't used to even imagine there was any way to change nor think free-enterprise should be compromised for any special interests, the outcome had always been negative when lobbyists got their way too often with either party.
Remember why Ronald Reagan and the bulk of the American people from both parties absolutely hated Communism so much?
It wan't mainly the economic differences from a free-market system; that barely made it onto the radar and was largely academic.
It was the dictatorship aspect that was so disgusting and anti-American as can be.
Dismal economic considerations under Communist governments were well-recognized as a logical result of dictatorship, that had been obvious for centuries.
Otherwise there wouldn't have been as much ambition for subjects to withdraw from dictator/monarchy regimes and settle in America to begin with.
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
You also have to learn how to do it without adding things like listeria which seems like a difficult task for at least one brand after multiple rounds of recalls.
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.
I've reduced my ice cream intake close to 0 solely based on price. Specifically, I remember the prices from long ago to the current just under $10. To me, ice cream should not be the same price of a cheap bottle of wine or other alcohol as an example comparison. We all have our own individual red lines, but ice cream prices crossed mine some time ago
Healthy economies "should" have a reward for specialization where both supplier and purchaser win. There is no reward anymore for economic specialization in the context of ice cream; its cheaper to make your own, now. This is a troubling long term implication for any *-as-a-service
There's a second even worse economic implication in that ice cream has long been affordable to 100% of US households... Now due to permanent long term economic decline its seen as acceptable losses for some not to afford it anymore. Again, troubling long term implications.
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.)
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
> 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?
The game of Clue, and other games/toys, are in basket of goods because on average Americans spend some portion of their income per surveys:
* https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/
The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
I think the ALICE index is great for tracking pure essentials and survivability, which is definitely important, but it's also not unreasonable to track things that aren't 100% essential.
My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.
Absolutely. You need both. The point I’m trying to make is that we only have CPI which drives most policy decisions. However when you need about $40k to just survive and 1/3 of the households make less than $50k before taxes, you also need something like this to make effective policy decisions. Social security payments are a great example. If you adjust them only based on CPI, and essentials get more expensive at a higher rate than non essentials, you create a system where over a period of time, social security payments would barely cover the essentials.
I did not know about this, and it's excellent. Seems like a one-shot explanation for the "vibe-flation" phenomenon that many people find mystifying.
Toys for kids are absolutely a necessity in most households with kids.
People could save so much money if they bought used instead of new more often, especially toys. It's crazy how much garbage we produce basically just because we literally don't share our toys.
I have come away from Christmas with almost the opposite conclusion. I have 3 young kids, and I notice almost an inverse correlation between the number of toys around and how contently they play.
The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.
Only when you can afford them.
Why does your child need 34 or 35 toys? She can be happy with just one or two toys.
Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.
There's value in the index you described as well, but IMO it doesn't make sense to use it as the basis for the overall economy.
> Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.
1/3 of the households make less than $50k. Mean survival budget is $35k-40k. After taxes, if a third of the population can barely meet a survival budget, an index like this needs to be part of the overall economy.
And the point of the ALICE index is exactly to address what you are pointing out. When wages, social security etc. were increasing proportionally to the essential goods, it made sense to have the CPI include other goods and services, allowing policy makers to use it as a basis for policy directions. However, when essentials become expensive faster than non essentials, it creates a problem for policy makers. It explains the “vibeflation” where policy makers were pushing back hard on economic struggles that most people are feeling by pointing to CPI numbers that show a 2-3% inflation, meanwhile people are struggling and dipping into savings to make things work.
We need to have both.
Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. Consumer spending can therefore easily look great while most people are struggling to get by. There really is no “overall economy”, there are many many different stories happening all at once, and focusing on simple metrics lets you easily fool yourself.
> Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending.
It means increasingly focusing on the spending of the rich, because the population is increasingly richer. Proportion of families making more that 150k (in 2024 dollars) has gone from 5% in 1967 to 33% in 2024, while both middle class (50k-150k) and poor (<50k) have decreased. [1]
[1] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dtoi!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Great example. The population as a whole is richer like you say, and also the richest 10% account for half of consumer spending, compared to 36% 30 years ago. [1] So yes, consuming spending has become more of a metric of the wealthy’s spending habits.
No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
It doesn't make a lot of sense to measure the cost of entertainment in terms of monetary inflation though. Hugely price-tiered status-signaling goods like kids toys just don't respond to market forces in the same way commodities do.
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)
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 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.
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.
It doesn't say that they accounted for possible changes in item quality. Tide detergent claims that their new 80-oz bottle of laundry detergent can wash 64 loads just like the previous 100-oz bottle because it's more concentrated, and I suppose NPR (if they'd retained a sample of the previous product) could have brought that to a chemistry lab to test and verify that claim, but I have no idea how you'd objectively prove that an ounce of salsa had truly remained the same product.
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.
"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?
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.
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...
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 sad to see, when I go to my local Walmart, how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases. It must be a significant source of liquid for them.
> how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases
One confounding factor here is that oftentimes the price is only reasonable in bulk. I don't know about walmart, but around me the best deal typically is "buy 2 get 3 free". I rarely buy/drink soda, but on the occasions I buy at all I'll be getting many cases at a time.
More importantly it is a significant source of calories. My brother quit soda years ago when he realized he was getting 1/3 of his daily calories from sugar - a little sugar is okay but you can't meet your daily nutrient needs when that much is from sugar. If it is just liquid soda is just as others (and probably better than alcohol), but there are other considerations.
Late stage capitalism
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
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.
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.)
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 can't think of a good explanation for this.
Supply and demand.
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.
Pepsi, coke ,Dr p, A&W root beer are now all .50c per can or more, in bulk cases from Sam's. Root beer is like 75c/can.
5 years ago I think they were about 30c.
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.
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!
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?
> 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.
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The useless ChatGPT spam is unfortunate, but Seafood Watch is a great source for this kind of thing.
would be interesting to reveal the holding company behind each brand and what impact they had on products
> 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.
For the other 96% of the world population: 1600 Penn is a cute slang term referring to the address of the White House, a.k.a the president.
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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?
So, the basic process is 1) Borrow stops making payments. 2) Borrow goes into forbearance for 12 months just prior to foreclosure start. 3) Forbearance ends, borrower cannot make current. 4) FHA steps in to do loan modification. Essentially, they roll the forebeared balance into the loan, payoff the existing mortgage, and issue a new FHA-backed loan, without any income or payment ability qualifications. 5) Repeat the process again.
So, the government is making everyone whole.
Mortgage foreclosure is a legal process that takes a very long time and is very expensive.
It doesn't take years, and it's less expensive than writing off the mortgage.
Banks are perfectly well equipped to foreclose on you. Ask anybody who was around in 2008.
You don't usually skate by on years of non-payments, so I'd sticker the original claim with [citation needed]
Don't know if this is what the OP is referring to, but: https://archive.is/2EObp
sounds like a very similar thing.
Here's another one on perpetual forbearances: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/covid-housing-relief-forever-rec...
This would seem to indicate that Covid forbearances are extending into 2026: https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/SFH/documents/SFH_FHA_INFO_...
Yeah, those are some of the programs I was referring to. The 'loophole' aspect that was mentioned on the podcast is that when the FHA does the 'loss mitigation' (aka, refi's the loan), there is not any kind of qualification as to whether the buyer will ever be able to make a payment on the new loan. It's just approved anyway, and the cycle can happen unlimited times.
I think they're looking at adding a means test, but I'm unsure.
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.
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.
Same here.
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.
Take my upvote and leave this platform forever
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.
We're well above 2% anyway, I doubt they will ever hit that again - they are already having to cut rates because job market is frozen, and that will increase inflation pressure.
I track my spend each year and my personal actual inflation rate has averaged about 4.5% over past 5 years. And I'm pretty low income, my spending is all core stuff.
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.
>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.
man, i already can't wait for November to be over.
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How did you get that from my post? Not wanting consumer tariffs when inflation has been high is pro-communism?
Don't even bother, it's not a good faith argument.
Ask more widely. People want reasonable services from their government, and tighter regulation of markets, with elimination of profit-taking middlemen.
They want democratic socialism.
Meanwhile, the right wing has been telling them that public libraries and public schools and everything good except profit -- is communism.
> People want reasonable services from their government
Yes, though the definition of "reasonable" is a real sticking point
> and tighter regulation of markets
This is less clear to me, but I would agree people want less fraud and deception in markets
> with elimination of profit-taking middlemen
I don't think many people think about this at all, and it's another very nebulous term
> They want democratic socialism.
No, democratic socialists want democratic socialism. Most Americans do not.
> Meanwhile, the right wing has been telling them that public libraries and public schools and everything good except profit -- is communism.
I disagree with basically everything the current incarnation of the Republican party is doing or stands for, and silly statements like this aren't helpful.
So... socialism?
People don't "essentially want communism" by advocating for socialist policy. Serious economists will tell you that it is impossible to transition America's free market into a planned economy. We're capitalist through thick and thin.
> We're capitalist through thick and thin.
Yet there is a sizeable number of us who consider seriously promises to "lower prices of X" like it's a thing that can be done by decree. It's disappointing is all.
I love when people with 0 capital think they are capitalists. The greatest con pulled on the working class.
it's about the dream of being able to have capital though, not actually about having capital. most people do not like the idea of a death tax even though most people will never have enough wealth where it would matter.
>We're capitalist through thick and thin.
Exactly, people didn't used to even imagine there was any way to change nor think free-enterprise should be compromised for any special interests, the outcome had always been negative when lobbyists got their way too often with either party.
Remember why Ronald Reagan and the bulk of the American people from both parties absolutely hated Communism so much?
It wan't mainly the economic differences from a free-market system; that barely made it onto the radar and was largely academic.
It was the dictatorship aspect that was so disgusting and anti-American as can be.
Dismal economic considerations under Communist governments were well-recognized as a logical result of dictatorship, that had been obvious for centuries.
Otherwise there wouldn't have been as much ambition for subjects to withdraw from dictator/monarchy regimes and settle in America to begin with.
> Remember why Ronald Reagan and the bulk of the American people from both parties absolutely hated Communism so much?
yes: because nationalizing industries represented a grave threat to western capitalists' bottom lines.
> It was the dictatorship aspect that was so disgusting and anti-American as can be
remember Pinochet? guess not.
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.
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
You also have to learn how to do it without adding things like listeria which seems like a difficult task for at least one brand after multiple rounds of recalls.
How does the cost of chilling, packaging, and moving 1/2 Gallon of ice cream differ from 1/2 Gallon of frozen dairy dessert?
Labor costs have risen. There are other inputs than a handful of raw materials.
Even if ice cream is lower, if the price of staples is going up you have to make cuts elsewhere.
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.
Maybe the milk and butter were local while the ice cream was imported and hit with tariffs?
Less than .2% of ice cream is imported.
Does ice cream need to be affordable to 100% of US households, regardless of their other budgeting decisions?
That's the implication of your comment.
I've reduced my ice cream intake close to 0 solely based on price. Specifically, I remember the prices from long ago to the current just under $10. To me, ice cream should not be the same price of a cheap bottle of wine or other alcohol as an example comparison. We all have our own individual red lines, but ice cream prices crossed mine some time ago
The implication is economic decline.
Healthy economies "should" have a reward for specialization where both supplier and purchaser win. There is no reward anymore for economic specialization in the context of ice cream; its cheaper to make your own, now. This is a troubling long term implication for any *-as-a-service
There's a second even worse economic implication in that ice cream has long been affordable to 100% of US households... Now due to permanent long term economic decline its seen as acceptable losses for some not to afford it anymore. Again, troubling long term implications.
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?
it may be that the costs of labor, distribution, and manufacture (for various reasons) have been increased
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.)