Inflation

It "ticked" up a little

This is a brief follow-up to my recent post about government statistics and economics — a post which proved, embarrassingly, to be timely. No sooner had the ink dried than the government announced that the inflation rate had “ticked up” to 3.8%. The economists were shocked. The pundits were shocked. Headlines across the entire media sphere erupted in coordinated disbelief: unexpected, higher than estimated, defying projections. One cable news anchor looked as though he might need a moment alone.

“Ticked up.” I want to dwell on that phrase for a moment, because it is doing heavy lifting. It suggests a modest, even dainty movement. Not a lurching, stomach-dropping leap in the cost of living. Somebody in a communications department earned their salary that day.

Now, I have a question. Where, exactly, do these economists live? Because it is clearly not anywhere near a supermarket, a gas station, a hardware store, or any establishment that sells goods to actual human beings. They appear to inhabit a parallel universe where numbers drift gently across screens, and no one has ever stood in a checkout line doing silent, horrified arithmetic.

The average consumer, not a credentialed expert in anything, knows about inflation weeks or months before the economists get around to measuring it. We know because we buy things. Radical concept, I realize.

Let me offer some data points from my recent fieldwork at a local grocery store conducted without a research grant.

Radishes. A humble bunch of radishes averaged somewhere between 95 cents and $1.10 for as long as anyone could remember. Dependable little things. Yesterday: $1.95. That is not a “tick.” That is closer to a full-throated leap, and radishes have not, to my knowledge, done anything to deserve it.

Gasoline jumped from roughly $2.80 a gallon to well over $4.00. I will leave the percentage calculation to the economists, since arithmetic appears to be their primary skill set, and even they seem to be struggling.

The one-pound bag of frozen, sustainably harvested, certified Wild Gulf Coast shrimp, a product I have watched with the devotion held steady around $9.00 for what felt like geological time. Yesterday it was $12.98. I stood there in the frozen foods aisle holding it at arm’s length as though it had personally wronged me.

A box of breakfast cereal of the middling kind, not the fancy kind with the dried fruit that falls to the bottom, is now $7.49. It contains, by weight, approximately as much air as cereal. The manufacturers have also quietly made the box narrower, apparently believing we won’t notice. We notice.

A rotisserie chicken, long celebrated as the great democratic protein of the American table, has crossed the $10 threshold in some places. The chickens themselves are the same size they always were. They have simply become more expensive through no fault of their own.

Coffee. Don’t get me started on coffee. Actually, let’s: a one-pound bag of mid-range ground coffee that once cost $8.99 is now nudging $14. There are people being paid to study inflation who cannot afford to stay awake long enough to understand it.

And so it went, down every aisle — condiments, bread, pasta, paper towels (paper towels!) — each item up anywhere from 5 to 25 percent. The sole exception, that defies all logic and provides no comfort whatsoever, was eggs. Eggs, after their own adventure in the stratosphere last year, have come back down to earth. I suppose we are meant to be grateful. I am choosing, instead, to be suspicious.

This chasm between what we are told and what we actually experience is not merely annoying. It corrodes something. Trust, though, that particular resource has been running low for some time. When the official version of reality and the lived version diverge badly enough and often enough, people stop bothering to reconcile them. They simply conclude that the official version is for someone else, describing some other country populated by economic abstractions who do not buy shrimp or fill their tanks or notice that the cereal box has gotten smaller.

I was so angry that when I came home from the store, I made a pot of soup from items I usually discard. Asparagus bottoms, the stems of watercress and arugula, a potato with developing eyes, the stems of parsley, and an onion. After blending, it was delicious. Next, I will attend to my victory garden and perhaps buy Eugenia Bone’s book, The Kitchen Ecosystem.

The TV analysts will continue to pontificate. They will talk about “core inflation,” which is inflation minus the things that actually went up; food and energy being the classic exclusions, presumably because no one eats or drives. They will reference “base effects,” “supply chain normalization,” and other phrases designed to make the incomprehensible sound merely technical.

Meanwhile, the rest of us will stand at the checkout, watching the numbers climb, and do the math ourselves.

Enough, I say.

The Sun City Curmudgeon