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Before the doomers run away with this thread, real spending on food prepared at home is down . This is more than off set by increased spending at restaurants. This returns to the pre-covid trends.
The comments are literally data being "refuted" with anecdotes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes Americans are rich and are also very busy. Life seems to push so fast that I know a lot of people buy food away from home due to a sense that they don’t have time to cook. There must be rich individuals in other cultures who still eat at home because they have more freedom to take the time to do so. Americans on a global scale are rich but I expect that living expenses are so high too that many people who often e…
Eating at home takes less time than eating out. Maybe about the same if you include washing up and putting everything away. Getting prepared food via DoorDash, I guess might be quicker, but you're still sitting there for 30-60 minutes in most cases waiting for it to show up. You can roast a chicken and vegetables in the oven in that time.
I think this has a lot to do with the under counting of inflation. If you go back to 80s methodology inflation has been much larger that what they've let on.
Is the 80s methodology more accurate or realistic? That's all that matters.
Everyone knows they are spending way more on food. The CPI inflation numbers feel like a lie.
"Ever before"? Those charts only go back to 1997, which is probably about when food was (inflation adjusted) at an all-time low price. The United States is almost 250 years old. "Ever" and you only looked at 30 years is some first-rate hand-wringing bullshit. What this article really says is that we are spending more money on food not prepared at home, and food not prepared at home is more expensive, duh.
I eat a lot of eggs and meat, and their prices are at least 50% higher than last year, not 6%. Inflation measures are such a joke.
Yeah, but you can get $7,500 off an electric vehicle!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yup. I think there's also an ongoing century long shift in "modern" culture that makes classical economics food "baskets" unrepresentative. Excepting wellness geeks, nobody who participates in "modern" culture lives on classical staples of grains, produce, dairy, and affordable cuts of meat. As a hardline economist in academia, you can say that those are what matter to poverty or starvation because people will eventu…
> The cultural traditions that made simple foods practical have been lost from many families and those never-learned recipes and habits don't just restore themselves to people overnight when times get tough. That strikes a chord. How do you fix this piece though?
In that worldview, General Mills has a right to sell desserts for breakfast without government interference, parents have a right to feed that to their kids without government interference, and kids have a right to enjoy them without government interference.
That a generation later, a homemade breakfast feels like a weekend project that ought to be made special with all sorts of elaborate dressings is apparently just something to be accepted when these rights are honored.
I have no idea how you "outcompete" Captain Crunch with a bowl of rice porridge in that world, and can only imagine the outcry and lawsuits from General Mills if the government put much meaningful effort into trying.
Before the doomers run away with this thread, real spending on food prepared at home is down . This is more than off set by increased spending at restaurants. This returns to the pre-covid trends.
This is technically correct ("the best kind of correct!"), but the upward march of that inflation-adjusted trend graph is pretty clear. I'm not a doomer, just trying to be even-handed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not familiar with the methodology of reporting inflation used in the 80s - did they take a wider basket of goods, or were there other consumer purchases in question that would affect the reporting number? If we were to use the 80s methodology - what would inflation numbers look like?
Shadow Stats has a chart showing the differences between both 80s and 90s methodologies and current: https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not familiar with the methodology of reporting inflation used in the 80s - did they take a wider basket of goods, or were there other consumer purchases in question that would affect the reporting number? If we were to use the 80s methodology - what would inflation numbers look like?
Shadow Stats has a chart showing the differences between both 80s and 90s methodologies and current: https://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
Look at that first chart. He literally just adds a constant to the CPI data.