US economy returned to growth last quarter, expanding 2.6%

> Me with my one comment?

You've made the same comment several times.

> but there seems to be a lot of skepticism

Why are you switching to the passive voice? Are you saying this or not.

> Given there's usually a fairly significant magnitude of the variation on inflation figures depending on the exact methodology

Not really. The price of a basket of goods, over time. Same as it's always been. As as already mentioned, GDP takes into account these numbers.

No company operates in a vacuum. Particularly, companies in commodity based industries, like grocery chains, which average maybe 3-5% gross margins, cannot arbitrarily increase prices without consequences (drop in demand). People will shift their purchasing power elsewhere. Unless, of course, every where else is also increasing prices because of the sheer amount of excess monetary liquidity sloshing around in the economy.

>You've made the same comment several times.

Are you sure you don't have me confused with someone else? I don't see any multiple comments in my history unless you've gone back over 3 months ago. If that's what you're referring to, I have no problem with it, but it just seemed odd.

>Why are you switching to the passive voice? Are you saying this or not.

Passive voice is a perfectly valid style not a mistake, and I'll take that fight to the death. The sentence indicates not just my own skepticism, but also the sense I get from other people on HN and real life where the prevailing opinion seems skeptical.

>Not really. The price of a basket of goods, over time. Same as it's always been. As as already mentioned, GDP takes into account these numbers.

Boy I have a lot of issues with that. It's NOT the same basket of goods. I don't personally agree with many of the substitutions, nor the exclusion of ownership in housing. There are SEVERAL competing measures of inflation and the variance between them I've seen is on the order of 25% of the reported value. That amounts to at least +/-2%, and that really would have a big affect on purported inflation-adjusted GDP when purported growth is similar in magnitude to the variance on inflation.

So, I'm not necessarily saying that the growth values are flawed. But I think I have a healthy skepticism of it, and I think that's appropriate, and, that skepticism is undeniably tied to the published inflation figures. In my industry, there's been massive contractions in investments and resulting layoffs. I've also seen most of my peers restrict their luxury spending because they've been priced out due to inflation. My personal basket of goods has seen an average YOY inflation around twice the purported value.

> People will shift their purchasing power elsewhere.

You are neglecting that people may not have a choice.

For people w/o cars, they are limited to whatever grocery stores are within walking distance, or accessible by mass transit.

In my case, my easiest choices are the extremely overpriced organic store, Safeway, or QFC. Once Safeway and QFC merge, I'll be down to basically two local choices, and I live in a major metro.

I know people who have one grocery store around them. There are parts of the country[1] where in a ~15+ mile radius you have a single choice for shopping.

Now throw in people who don't have the time, or ability, to commute, and many grocery stores can charge whatever the heck they want up to the limit of what consumers can afford.

https://mobile.twitter.com/moetkacik/status/1580938712740831...

From that thread, yes indeed, the price increase is 76% for 2019 to 2022, but that is (obviously) a completely absurd level of price increases for a 3 year timespan.

And this isn't some unique situation, this is pricing at one of America's largest grocery retailers, a grocery store chain that is the sole grocery store in many communities, and a grocery store chain that is set to soon become much larger.

[1] This isn't unusual, in Washington State if you go outside any major city, you find that smaller cities/towns basically have one Safeway for the surrounding area and that is it. Visiting friends on the east coast, I noticed a similar situation, a cluster of small towns and a single grocery store (Kroger owned).

I think that is a good point, and one of the reasons this inflationary period seems to be so widely misunderstood and contentious. We just spent over 2 years dealing with a pandemic, there will be side effects caused by the pandemic as well as the solutions to ease its impact.

In regard to car prices, I would say that the prices themselves contribute to the inflation statistics, but they are not caused by inflationary pressure.