Earlier quoted context omitted.
kombucha and it is very much an acquired taste IMO
How is fermented tea “mushroom water”?
Some call the mother colony a 'mushroom'.
The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
101–110 of 227 posts
Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#102I’ve seen some people showing actual price increases they’ve seen in their local communities. For a lot of folks it’s much higher than is being reported. Here’s one from a person in Seattle: https://preview.redd.it/max54wqv9kb91.png?width=1112&format=...
That seems massively susceptible to sampling bias. eg. are you really reporting all of your costs, or only the costs that you noticed going up? Meanwhile BLS provides regional CPI numbers[1], which puts "Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA" inflation at 10.1% between Jun 2021 and Jun 2022. https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/factsheet/consumer-price-in...
CPI has been engineered to meet targets for a long time. Several major flaws with CPI:
Hedonic adjustments are more or less at the mercy of the bureaucrats. For example, new vehicles did not go up in hedonic-adjusted price from 1997 to 2020 according to the BLS [0]. The justification is that new cars have bluetooth and other features that counter-act the price change. An automatic Toyota Corolla was $12373 brand new in 1997. It was $19700 in 2020. Our inflation numbers over those years did not incorporate a price increase AT ALL, so it's a fair assessment that real inflation was higher based on that alone. The Big Mac index has probably always been the most accurate assessment, free of political pressures.
And the most fundamental problem: the survey evaluates the median spending of a sample of Americans, but the median American spends pretty much all of their money. So you end up with the dotted line in this chart: [1]. Spoiler, it's pretty much a flat line. Real median wages don't move because CPI is calculated by measuring median wages. If prices rise, people can't spend more than all of their money, so they buy cheaper things and buy less of them, and this changes the weights and reduces the inflation numbers. The fact that some economists with PhD's think this makes sense is why you should always do your due diligence instead of accepting a doctor's diagnosis blindly.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUUR0000SETA01 [1] https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekl...
Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
While a particular dry season isn't indicative of climate change, Texas is very much experiencing a decades-long drying that is definitely attributable to climate change. That water park may not be viable much longer. https://www.cbsnews.com/dfw/news/megadrought-texas-american-...
Lived here for over 1.5 decades and do not see a "decades-long drying". Texas isn't perfect but water management is something it does right. https://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-last-drop/ "Among the fifty states, Texas may rank near the bottom in many categories—including environmental protection (forty-fifth), quality of parks and recreation (forty-ninth), and availability of mental health care (forty-sixth)—b…
That water plan had some costs too. "Goodbye to a river" talks anout some of them. I mostly agree with you though. Amarillo being the exception, they water their perfect lawns like the aquifer was bottomless, and it certainly isn't. The sudden transition to a natural landscape at the edge is quite jarring. Most cities in TX do much better, probably all.
Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm super skeptical of posts like this because they seem cherry picked, or at best, have local price increases that aren't reflected elsewhere in the country. Half of those are restaurants, who have had challenges for the past 2 years outside of inflation. Gas has its own challenges, a head of lettuce at my local grocer is $1.52 which is cheaper than that person's 2021 price. Notably not included in that post is thin…
"My point isn't that inflation doesn't exist." My wife tells me different, so I'm going with her real world experience in the matter.
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Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems massively susceptible to sampling bias. eg. are you really reporting all of your costs, or only the costs that you noticed going up? Meanwhile BLS provides regional CPI numbers[1], which puts "Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue WA" inflation at 10.1% between Jun 2021 and Jun 2022. https://www.bls.gov/regions/west/factsheet/consumer-price-in...
CPI has been engineered to meet targets for a long time. Several major flaws with CPI: Hedonic adjustments are more or less at the mercy of the bureaucrats. For example, new vehicles did not go up in hedonic-adjusted price from 1997 to 2020 according to the BLS [0]. The justification is that new cars have bluetooth and other features that counter-act the price change. An automatic Toyota Corolla was $12373 brand new…
I agree in general about the hedonic adjustments and their potential for manipulation or miscalculation. But automobiles are probably the worst example!
Toyota didn't even roll out passenger side airbags until 1998. Only the driver had them prior to this. The new Corolla has 8 airbags. Today we have better fuel efficiency, collision protection, driver assistance, remote start... Even the seats are more comfortable. Not to mention most car brands have much better warranties today than they did in the '90s.
Other things get hedonic adjustments but shouldn't. Shirts for instance.
Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#106That’s rough, but when a business is no longer economically viable it’s probably time to close up shop.
What if the economic change is transient? There are only two regular restaurants in town. The impact is larger than just the owner.
Just the same thing as people say on HN for other things. Your business model is not my problem.
Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#107I’ve seen some people showing actual price increases they’ve seen in their local communities. For a lot of folks it’s much higher than is being reported. Here’s one from a person in Seattle: https://preview.redd.it/max54wqv9kb91.png?width=1112&format=...
Last year I could buy a whole chicken for roasting for about $10. Now they are $17 or so. 70% increase. Beef the same. Pork hasn't jumped as much for some reason. Ground turkey is about the most affordable meat I can find right now, but when you cook it you can see that it has a lot of water in it.
This is where I'm always curious to see what other dynamics are going on in other places, I don't know how else to say it except that has absolutely not been my experience. In live in just normal midwest suburbia, so if there's places living with that, I should really count my blessings I don't.
With a lot of these things nowadays, I've been looking at my receipt data and rooting through FRED, and obv the absolute numbers are probably not going to be bang-on, but the percentages are definitely pretty similar.
So yeah, it's not fantastic, but FRED data for chicken, beef, sirloin is like 20%, 26%, 51% in two years, which agrees pretty well with what little data I personally have, or their estimate is a fair bit higher for the sirloin (also prob hard to estimate since I wouldn't treat it like as much a commodity as ground beef). Milk is a similar story, FRED has like 40% in two years, knock on wood I don't think I've observed that, but dairy might be a midwest speciality for these purposes.
whole chicken, beef, sirloin. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000706111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703112 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0400703613
Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
"My point isn't that inflation doesn't exist." My wife tells me different, so I'm going with her real world experience in the matter.
If you or your wife look at the past and current price of lettuce in the local store and then use that to make the conclusion that the purchasing power of the US Dollar has decreased 47%, then I don't know what to tell you. Your cost of living may have increased, but I do not understand how you can conclude an increase in inflation from living your daily life.
I know that my total grocery bill (not just lettuce) has more than doubled in the past few years. Gas too.
"The purchasing power of the US Dollar has decreased 47%" sounds about right.
Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#109For context, I live in San Saba and Lampasas, TX. San Saba is located two hours northwest of Austin where the population density is three people per square mile. While there is truth to the story about inflation hitting rural, poorer areas the hardest, this gentleman's quotes are a but of a stretch. > Brisket went from one sixty-nine a pound to seven Brisket has not been $1.69 for years, unless this gentleman has som…
> It seems that this person is saying we could lose BBQ in all 254 counties in Texas? That's unmitigated hyperbole and balderdash. I interpreted this to mean that BBQ is available in all of the counties in TX, and that may no longer be true in the future, since some rural counties may lose their last BBQ joint.
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Re: The true costs of inflation in small-town Texas
#110As others said: traffic goes down, restaurants close doors. Food prices may not be the culprit, people getting their meals from delivery and cooking at home may be the cause as well. Having that said, I do work in market research and gather purchase data and create inflation models for a living and to be honest things look really scary from the US to UK+EU and Latin America (which is used to high inflation though). W…
> Who knew all that free money from the last decade would do that!
As if a war where one of the largest fossil fuel exporters, also exporting enormous amounts of foodstuffs, invaded the biggest exporter in some foodstuffs (grain, sunflower oil, etc.) and a pandemic with all the death, lowered economic activity and lockdowns have nothing to do with the current economic situation. Oil and gas prices are up, and they're a factor in pretty much every other product's price. Add in foodstuff shortages helping drive their prices even more. Some of the increases are profiteering, some are anticipation, some are cold hard math. "Free money" is only a part of it.