yeah, people are being forced to buy features or addons, which adds to the cost. this is another way to pass on inflation to the consumer marketed as a 'good deal', when it isn't. instead of an economical small car, you have to buy a bigger car which gets worse mileage and full of unwanted stuff.

Yeah - I distinctly remember back in 2006-2007 (My early college days) getting a 2 for $2 deal at McDonalds - 2 bacon, egg and cheese biscuits for $2. Now one biscuit (normally) is $3.89 and they run 2 for $5 specials, but seemingly way less often. Back in the day, the special was ran literally all the time, but even still the cost of the biscuit was under $2. And this is 7 years past 1999.

The Big Mac Index shows the price of a big mac in 2000 at $2.24, and now at $5.58, so that would put $1 in 2000 at $2.49 in 2020 which feels a lot closer to the actual number...but still low because everything "around" the entree has also increased similarly, if not more.

One thing that happened since 1999 is the rise of price discrimination at fast food restaurants (well price discrimination in general, but fast food is easiest to see). If you have the App, you can get that $5.59 big Mac with a free fry and drink. Without the app, the meal is probably close to $10. (Just a made up example, but in general app coupons seem to often save 30-50% over not using coupons).

In about the same period Taco Bell had the .79/.89/.99 menu options. You could feed a family of four for about $10. Now even the $5 combo box is becoming rare.

Simple burgers were $0.29 and cheeseburgers $0.39 at McD's the whole time I was in high school in the early aughts.

>- 2 bacon, egg and cheese biscuits for $2. Now one biscuit (normally) is $3.89 and they run 2 for $5 specials

But the chickens now live cage-free and (thanks to California) the pigs will now be able to turn around in their pens.

> but I also think bargains have disappeared

I think the big one is the people who produce inflation statistics struggle to capture increases when products change, particularly shrinkflation.

The ONS (Who produce the UK inflation statistics) specifically noted limitations in their methodology because when a particular product (whether that's a particular brand, or specific size) is discontinued, they replace it in their subsequent basket with a similar item for measuring inflation but don't measure the change in inflation from the change in product.

For example a 25p can of peas may be withdrawn from sale by the manufacturer, so the next month ONS would switch to checking the price of a 30p can of peas (the next cheapest can). The fact that people who were buying that can of peas now have to pay 5p more for peas is never captured in inflation.

This is definitely part of the problem, and another issue is quality decrease. Sure, maybe a given item has only increased 80% in price, but perhaps now the quality has decreased so that ultimately you are comparing apples to oranges.

The fun thing with quality is that statistics agencies are in fact trying to include quality change in their inflation calculation (it's called hedonic adjustment) but AFAIK they only do it for “objective quality” increases (like when CPU clock frequency increases or Disk Size increase), not when actual quality decreases.

BLS personnel don't "struggle" to capture shrinkflation. They are well aware of the issue and always normalize prices by actual weight or volume. Have you read their documentation?