But… that is inflation. Prices are going up. Such is the anecdata?

Is this effect global? Who knows, it’s anecdata

I've been feeling the price rises too, I second the Costco thing entirely too. I have a ton of receipt data I can analyze. I've been curious to track my personal expenses for things like milk, take out burgers, and other stuff I regularly purchase and have lots of data points on over time. I think the anecdata speaks, very loudly for the individual visibly paying more.

I would like to know more. My first suspicion is that most people don't track this data closely enough. Unfortunately after tracking this data for about 15 years, I stopped in 2018 (too cumbersome). I was able to tell you exactly how much money we spent on alcohol vs. dairy vs. veggies etc.

If only I had continued, I could've provided great anecdata here, because we never really "go out". And herein lies the crux. Many if not most other people I know go out regularly. Rain or shine, recently got kids or not etc. So the pandemic hitting would drive up their Costco bills even if prices stayed flat.

Happy to learn that the anecdata presented in this thread is from people like me. But otherwise my "felt" Costco bill has stayed almost the same (minus "normal" inflation).

yah the cumbersome part is for real; for the longest I never itemized groceries, just lump sums spent. I've been slowly automating more of the process. For online purchases I write some chrome extensions that scrape the order pages and downloads a Json file for me. Works for the most part and I'm looking to extend to a few more vendors: https://github.com/jxramos/webOrders.

All the data captured over the years omits very fine detail for the most part; things like weights and volumes and stuff. The data is fairly messy but there should have some signal within it however. This motivates me to revisit what sort of receipt OCR stuff is out there, it's been a TODO for a long time. I'm looking for mainly partially automated stuff, fully automate the frequent vendors, manual entry the rest: https://gist.github.com/jxramos/db8195d1972b6d7f7eb0e97be51d...

Yeah before giving up completely I checked into OCR as well. However I haven't found solutions that are both easily usable by consumers (e.g. a mobile app) and actually is able to itemize and categorize. Everything I found was only able to figure out that something is a say Costco receipt and then categorize that whole receipt say as "groceries". That doesn't help at all.

I even went as far as building a small mobile app using AWS OCR. I was able to itemize and categorize using that but it still required manual "fingerprinting" of each receipt type. Basically figuring out that something was a Costco receipt and in Costco receipts this column in the OCR'd text was the name of the item etc and then also defining the mapping of item name to category.

Worked well enough but I wasn't willing to pay for this after all the free trials and such if it couldn't be monetized by releasing the app. And since the fingerprinting is pretty cumbersome and error prone (Costco doesn't even have a global standard for their receipt format, never mind different gas stations etc) and I neither have the expertise nor the necessary training data for a machine learning approach.

>But… that is inflation

did I say it wasn't? The BLS freely admits that inflation is higher than usual at 5.4% YOY. What's being disputed is whether it's 5.4% as the BLS claims or 20% as GGP claims.

>Is this effect global? Who knows, it’s anecdata

The problem is that listing a bunch of things that's gone up by 20% doesn't mean the overall CPI went up 20%. CPI is a weighted measure, so the things you listed only contribute 1% to it, then it can go up 2000% and the CPI wouldn't be anywhere close to the claimed 20%.

I read the gp comments as questioning the relevance of the CPI. From my experience it understates the very real price increases I am seeing where I am

>From my experience it understates the very real price increases I am seeing where I am

the "very real price increases" you're seeing is clouded by the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic. The CPI uses a fixed basket to weigh the different price increases. Meanwhile in your head, your brain weighs price increases based on the shock factor. That lyft ride that got 2x more expensive? That's going to have much more mental weight than your rent that stayed about the same, even though the rent makes up 40% of your monthly spend and your lyft rides makes up 5%.

Also good old fashioned confirmation bias. If someone thinks inflation must be through the roof and the government is lying about it, then they're going to notice things that get more expensive, while ignoring things that get cheaper or stay the same.

The prices faced by the average tech worker are very different. Restaurant prices in SF have one of the highest increasing prices indices in the country, you can look it up.

Ubers have also increased in price.

Groceries.. have not.

> Is this effect global? Who knows, it’s anecdata

You say this like no one measures inflation, but in fact we do measure inflation quite carefully, and it's nowhere near 20%.

Ehh, not _that_ carefully. Real inflation is notoriously difficult to track, as you need to take into consideration things like decreases in manufacturing quality, ingredient substitutions, planned obsolescence, etc.

Ehh, they try pretty damn carefully. They absolutely do take into consideration things like changing quality and ingredients.

> Pricing information is then sent to our national office, where specialists who have detailed knowledge about the particular goods or services review the data. These specialists check the data for accuracy and consistency, and make any necessary corrections or adjustments. Adjustments can range from an adjustment for a change in the size or quantity of a packaged item, to more complex adjustments based upon statistical analysis of the value of an item's features or quality. Thus, commodity specialists strive to prevent changes in the quality of items from affecting the CPI's measurement of price change.

> Hedonic quality adjustment is one of the techniques the CPI uses to account for changing product quality within some CPI item samples. Hedonic quality adjustment refers to a method of adjusting prices whenever the characteristics of the products included in the CPI change due to innovation or the introduction of completely new products.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/questions-and-answers.htm#Question_1...

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/quality-adjustment/questions-and-ans...

> But… that is inflation. Prices are going up. Such is the anecdata?

But what proportion do [thing] and [thing stays the same] make up of your budget? That's why the CPI uses a basket of goods, each in proportion to what the average person uses in their lives to find the average inflation.

And some [thing]s may be more noticeable than others: yes, gas may have gone up, but your care insurance perhaps hasn't, and so perhaps hasn't parts and maintenance. But you fill up more often so you notice those prices more and suffer recency bias.

In Canada, StatCan actually has a "Consumer Price Index Personal Inflation Calculator" so that you can find the quantitate number to your personal experience of inflation give your personal basket of goods, versus the average one:

* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/71-607-x/71-607-x2020015...