“Oh, inflation isn’t that bad!”
I’ve got 19 years of records, of every item I’ve ever spent on groceries, every gallon of gas I’ve ever pumped in to what car, every killowatt consumed by appliances, insurance coverage, how much takeout food we’ve consumed, and a variety of other data points, and whilst my lifestyle has no doubt grown in the intervening two decades since I started tracking, and whilst I am also only a single household, our monthly household budget has gone from $5,700-ish in November 2019 to almost $8,000/month in February of 2022.
I can tell you how much I spent on milk in any given month in any given year for the past two decades, in what store the milk was purchased, how much was purchased, what day it was purchased on, and in what city it was purchased. And I can pull that data for every grocery item, every clothing item, every light bulb, and every set of guitar strings.
That’s a span of merely two years, yet our monthly expenditure has risen 38% in that time. We’re travelling less, we’re buying less non-edible household items, we’re driving less, we’re eating out less, and yet still our expenditure increases unabashedly at an unprecedented rate.
I cannot imagine what effect this is having on those families in a less privileged position, but when someone tells me that only just these past few months has inflation begun to rise rapidly my only comment is “Pull the other one mate, it’s got bells on.”