Re: Food Prices

On 6/4/2025 2:49 PM, marika wrote:

cyclintom <cyclintom@yahoo.com> wrote:

At the local supermarket, food prices have been dropping like rocks. Take
for instance, wine, Apothic red mixes just scant weeks ago were showing
$16.99 reduced to $10.99. Now, the same thing is $10.99 reduced to $6.99.
Bread is almost back to pre-Biden. I'm telling you, those tariffs are
really killing us. Certainly not everything has gone down but I'm
assuming that they soon will.
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 I am not really convinced the examples you gave are driven by tariff
changes nor out of country supply changes.. Sounds like mostly lical stuff
you listed. Apothic for instance is a California made brand.
And I think you might mean pre Covid prices, not pre Biden.
 What about real estate, especially new construction prices?  Are they down
in your area?
 Not that it matters but I’m real curious…
 is there any way you could report on all these food and real estate
construction  sales price and whether they change in a year?
Totally because I am just curious, no other reason.
    

Those reports are from Mr Kunich's area for selected items and not necessarily representative of general inflation. All prices fluctuate, especially locally, and that is independent of general inflation.
'General inflation rate' is always approximate and exists in many formats[1] but is necessarily imperfect[2]. It can be useful when the same methodology is used for the same economy at regular intervals for comparison over time.
[1] My favorite subset term is 'excluding food and energy', that is, 'not counting things you actually buy a lot'.
[2] A good friend was called by the Commerce Department four times every year for 25 years with the question, "How much is a Raleigh Gran Prix?"  In 1972 that was a very popular model considered indicative of general disposable income purchases for imported goods.  Trouble is, Raleigh's ownership changed four times over that period and Raleigh Gran Prix were utterly different every few years; from steel rims to aluminum, from plain pipe to CrMo, from Britain/Netherlands at first to Japan and then ROC and then Communist China and absolutely unlike the early model at the end. Oh, and eventually a pathetically niche item not at all representative of 'popular imported bicycles'.  I assume that is much like any other manufactured product, in that a 1980 computer is not a 1990 computer although one contract of a commodity (5000 bushel trading unit of Red Wheat for example) is very comparable.
--
Andrew Muzi
am@yellowjersey.org
Open every day since 1 April, 1971