who are still paying more than 20 per cent more for a basket of groceries relative to three years ago
Well, according to my grocery records, it's a MINIMUM 20% more on most items. Some are 200% more and some are 60% more.
this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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I said this a few months ago and I was downvoted lmao.
When grocery prices go from $4 to $8, that's a 100% increase. Or when prices go from $2.50 to $8 that's a 220% increase.
Might not seem so bad on paper, but when you add it all together on your full grocery bill, it's turning the final bill from $100 to $200-250, which is bat shit insane.
I bought knock off mustard yesterday. Normal sized bottle. Cost me $8.
People down voting aren't are the ones grocery shopping.
I also think people are missing the fact that while prices have gone up, shrinkflation has been out of control.
So while it may look like "only" a 50% increase for the package, the price per unit (often by weight) ends up being more like a 75% increase.
I have containers which wouldn't be able to store a regular sized box of regular cereal, but now it gets to 3/4 full with the "family sized" version of the same cereal. And I'm paying double for it. Some of the cereal boxes look comically thin, like cigarette packages. And you're paying 2-3x more by weight. Absolute insanity.
Fucking cereal box, the family size is $10.99, wtf?!?
When they are $5.49 on amazon I buy a dozen
My dogs food used to be $29.99 a case, now it's $42.99 a case. That's a 40% increase in two years. Crazy.
Yeah it's crazy. I started making my own wet dog food (i give him about 50% wet and dry food). Chicken hearts or liver, carrots, a frozen veggie medley (just be careful it's all dog safe) brown rice and pumpkin in an instant pot. Cost per unit is about 60c, but I get most of it from a farmers market which brings the cost down a lot. Takes about an hour to makeevery 3 weeks, then I scoop it out into baby food containers and freeze them, and reheat in the microwave before feeding it to my dog. He loves them and seems a lot more healthy. It really was a big win all around for me, only downside is his shit smells way worse now.
I bought my 1st dog just before the pandemic. The bag for 38lbs of food was around 80$. The price have been rising a little every time I would buy one.
Before this summer the bag was 120$. I told myself that I'm going to look for alternative. Meanwhile I don't. So I go to the pet store to get a new bag of food. The price tag was the same (120$) but the size got reduced from 38lbs to around 31lbs.
I got upset and I ask WTF is going with that brand (good brand of food made in Canada with Canadian ingredients) and she told me that it got bought. So the new owners are pressing the lemon as much as they can.
Seriously it's pure fucking greed.Fuck them. Now I buy cheap Cosco food that seems to fine with dog. It upset me I just feel every thing I like get ruined by greed.
If it's the Kirkland dog food, I think that's actually really good dog food. So, no worries there.
Yeah it is Kirkland! That's what I though but my brother was giving me so much shit at first. Just brothers things I guess.
Kirkland is the one I feed my dog. All his life and he's a healthy 11 year old great Pyrenees with a good appetite. Their cases of canned food used to be $29.99 and it was great. Bags of kibble went up as well but not quite as much, but I didn't pay that much attention to the weight when I first bought it.
"Slower growth in prices may be imperceptible to consumers who are still paying more than 20 per centΒ more for a basket of groceries relative to three years ago β the biggest such increase in 40 years," [said a TD economist]...
While the pain at the cash register for staples like food and gasoline is getting comparatively better,
I always get a kick out of these pieces. The expert says we're "still paying more". Then the writer says "the pain ... is getting comparatively better."
If that 20% is a noticeable part of your budget, it isn't getting better.
It will when you get a 20% pay raise⦠any day now, right?
20% pay raise isn't enough, though. My grocery bill is OVER 2x the money for the same items. That means we need an over 100% pay raise.
But you're not using yourself whole salary on groceries, though.
Rent went from $900 to $1600. Gas went from $1 to $2.20.
So ya. Everything has doubled or more.
So⦠the cost of rent is directly tied to the mortgage rate. Are we done with rate hikes now?
the cost of rent is directly tied to the mortgage rate
Who told you that?
Well, when our glorious landlords own multiple properties with variable mortgages and rates go up, they pass on the increases to the tenants. So it's not directly tied, but there is a connection.
Those "glorious landlords" you're referring to should have their multiple properties seized or have their financials squeezed to the point of blood. Fuck every last one of them. People have by and large turned into greedy fucks and it's disgusting.
If not greed, how would you describe yourself in the paragraph above?
Not really. Rent is based on demand and landlords will take as much as the market will bear. It's pretty much independent of mortgage rates.
Case in point, rent in Southwestern Ontario exploded in 2020 & 2021, when interest rates were low and have stayed pretty level since, even with the significant increase in rates.
The price of everything is based on demand and offer. The price of production affects the offer.
Not really. In a system where demand is fairly inelastic (everyone needs somewhere to live and the only real flex is having roommates/living at home/homelessness or renting two apartments) and where the supply is currently extremely constrained, expenses are going to have next to no impact on rental prices.
For example, I was fortunately able to buy a townhouse two years ago (when interest rates were low) to live in. My mortgage is ~ $1,200/mo. Other units have been going on the rental market pretty consistently for ~$2,000/mo. Even with the increased interest rates, new landlord's would still have a net positive of ~$500/mo between the rent they receive and their mortgage payments. There might be a loss of profit, but with profits already so high, it's not going to affect rates on a macro scale.
the area where you live sounds like the exception, not the rule (and this is an article from last year): https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/rising-rent-housing-market-canada-1.6525075
Interest rates are rising and the house-buying market is cooling off, putting more strain on rentals
The cost of rental housing is rising throughout Canada, according to Rental.ca. Analysts say rising interest rates are part of the problem.
Mostly no. The major drivers of price are supply and demand, not cost and demand. However, the βmost profitable priceβ ( which is rarely the highest for those unfamiliar with economics ) does increase with the marginal cost. So the cost of production does play a role.
I'm not an economist so I could be wrong, but this is my thought process about it: If a product becomes too expensive to produce for some companies, those companies will stop selling it. Less companies selling the product = less offer less offer = higher price.
That stood out to me, too. Stripping out mortgage interest, inflation is at 2.1%.
It can't completely be looked at in isolation like that, of course; part of the reason prices are lower on most things aside from groceries and housing is because people just don't have money left over for these things after paying for essentials. If mortgage interest were lower, demand for other goods would be higher and prices would rise faster.
Still, this adds support for BoC rates to stay frozen in the near term and decline in 2024.
Can I be one to say that despite all the shit on reddit that was given about the BoC not doing enough, or doing too much... So far they've done a damn good job at managing this given the fact that Jesus Christ are we dealing with once in a century issues. I will also give the Liberals props and the OPC props. We know what bad leadership looked like (see Alberta) but by and large most provinces and the country have turned out surprisingly well compared to their global partners.
- Pandemic
- War in Ukraine
- Escalating climate change
Yet here in Canada on a global scale we are still prospering and doing well. I"m speaking broad generalizations here. So if you're not doing well on an individual level I hear you, it sucks and we should be doing better.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Statistics Canada reported Tuesday that the biggest reason for the deceleration in the cost of living was a drop in the cost of gasoline, which declined byΒ 6.4 per cent during the month of October alone, and is down by 7.8 per cent compared to where pricesΒ were a year ago.
If gasoline is stripped out of the numbers, the inflation rate would have been 3.6 per cent in October.
That's slightly lower than the 3.7 per cent non-gasoline inflation rate clocked the month before.
While that's still higher than the overall inflation rate, it's down from the 5.8 per cent annual pace seen in September.
While the pain at the cash register for staples like food and gasoline is easing, plenty of other aspects that contribute to the cost of living continue to increase at an eye-watering level.
The data agency says the typical cost of rent went up by 8.4 per cent in the past year.
The original article contains 229 words, the summary contains 156 words. Saved 32%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
The problem is that it's a year on year comparison, they should use a point in time and give a second number that would be a comparison to that point.
https://cupe.ca/cpi-calculator
From June 2019 to June this year inflation is 15.33%, that's something people can understand and feel, not 3.1% since last year. It's also using a reference point that is much more logical, months before a period of international turmoil, it shows us the impact the events of the last few years had and explains why we see inequality suddenly getting much much worse.
Those far smarter than me will and have commented on this before but my understanding is for purity sake there are specific ways they quantify inflation and the method you're referring to is far more disingenuous.
Personally speaking, year over year "makes sense" as this way it doesn't mask potentially disastrous trends (ie. disinflation).
Year on year only makes sense for economists, it doesn't make sense for regular people, hence all the comments every time they report the numbers saying "Yeah well my grocery is up X%, rent is up Y%, gas Z%, that's a whole lot more than what they're reporting!"
People live inflation long term, not on a yearly basis and those who are lucky enough to be unionized negotiate their wage increase over multiple years, not every year, both numbers are important, it's still dishonest to only report the year on year increase when people still have it fresh in mind that lettuce was 99 cents not too long ago and it's been over 4$ for years now, to them inflation isn't 3%, it's 400% on lettuce, the fact that it's stagnated for the last year means nothing on their budget when they suddenly had a hard time buying and they still have a hard time buying it.
Another example, housing is starting to stagnate if not depress in some markets, do you really think that people feel like they can trust economists when they're told "There's deflation in the housing market in your region." when they look at the price of a house that was selling for 300k five years ago when they were ready to buy and couldn't afford it and that's now on the market for 800k instead of 850k line it would have been 6 months ago? Sure, year on year there's deflation, it doesn't mean shit when you're trying to purchase a good that you want to own long term and all you see is that you still can't afford it because wages have been stagnating.
Heck, take actual wages into consideration and inflation is a hell of a lot worse than what's presented in the news! If prices stay the same but wages go down, it will get reported as inflation being 0% when in fact it's positive!
I don't disagree with a lot you're saying but there's a reason economists use x to x comparisons and that's because your best comparison for October 2023 is October 2022 not September 2023.
What you're describing is where, and it sucks saying this because it's cold AF, numbers don't care about feelings.
The layman like you and I want to put our lives into context on the numbers we see because we are in the weeds. That's fine and good and we are 100% valid in feeling the way we do but it doesn't change the reality that the best comparison for October 2023 is October 2022.
Now again I'm a dumbass. There are plenty better than me at explaining this but as someone currently doing heavy data analysis on a P1 we had at work you do not compare the day of the failure with the previous day because they're two different days of the week. Processes differ per day. If the issue happened on Thursday I want to compare it against previous Thursdays.
By this logic might as well take last month to compare because it's even closer!
If you compare the same month because you expect it to be the same annual conditions then you can use the same month two years prior or three years prior... Will you look at that, that's what I did! June to June, 15.33% over 4 years where you would have expected inflation to be 8.2% based on the BoC's objective to have inflation at 2%.
I'm not saying year on year isn't important to report, I'm saying they should report more than just that so people understand the difference and understand why 3% isn't what they're seeing.
Hell, did you know they also adjust the goods they use to compare so the 3% might be inside a basket of food but suddenly you're not buying chicken, you're buying tofu? Sure that's what people do in reaction to inflation, it still gives a very skewed view of what the real inflation is. With a fixed basket of goods inflation was higher than 15% in the USA in 2022 and you know what's funny? Anyone could have told you that the reported number made no sense when looking at the actual cost of living.
I'm still waiting on people "far smarter than you" to come and tell me I'm wrong to find it ridiculous that they only report year on year, funny they're not here.#
The people far smarter than us are the ones that do month over month and not the way you want. I fail to see how you are smarter that legions of economists around the world.
Again, I get what you're saying. For a layman like you and I it helps our emotions to do it a different way. What I keep stressing is that to those experts there is an intentional reason to not include emotion when analyzing numbers. If you do so you run the risk of making the wrong decisions.
You are free to continue screaming into the wind because the process is different than you would like. I'm simply telling you it isn't. There are more than likely very VERY good reasons. Better to spend your energy on more productive things.
What are you using the inflation number for? How does saying it is up 15% help you?
The point of measuring inflation at all is that we can use the information to make decisions. Knowing that inflation is slowing or rising is useful. I know prices have gone up. What I want to know is how much they are likely to go up in the future. Am I stockpiling sugar or putting a little money into stocks? How long should I lock my mortgage in for? Will I even be able to afford it? Do I need a second source of income? Or do I think I might be able to save a little this year for a big purchase? How much money am I going to need to retire? How old will I be?
The value of these numbers is forward looking. If I want to know that prices have gone up, I can just go to the store. I do not need the government for that.
If you're looking forward then what do you need the year on year number for? What you want is future predictions, if you want to know how the price has varied in the last year you can "just go to the store" right?