5% year over year, not per month.

Not what I'm seeing. Hot dog buns to cheese, everything that was $2 is $3 right now. I swear everything has whole foods price right now. I don't care what the govt. is tracking they are obviously not in my safeway.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics actually employees quite a few people to call stores across the country and get prices. Planet money interviewed one such person not long ago. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/13/1015804773/how-do-you-measure...

The other thing I noticed is that for about a month some items had a price increase of about $1 but at the same time suddenly was "on sale" for $1 off (club card sale). So with the club card you paid the same price as last month. The sale ended two days ago and low and behold what I used to pay 3.50 is now 4.50. I have a feeling if they are calling stores, they are probably giving them the club-card price, so some of these price hikes are delayed.

If someone actually finished working on an inflation database website I would love to enter data for them. I'm seeing spikes across everything I buy in the last 2 months. I feel like the true inflation for food itself is at least 33% in the last 5 months.

My understanding is that the price of food is not generally included in the most-commonly reported version of the CPI for the past few decades. So you could both be right.

And to clarify... that's 5.3% over last August, when (some) prices were depressed because of the pandemic. Inflation is already slowing down.