Could a UK HN'er give a first-hand perspective? I'm curious to hear what it's like "on the ground" in your area, versus what a government or industry announcement might say.
At least for the US, it's a lot more nuanced than "inflation is X%" -- certain things are consistently more expensive, others are more variable, and others yet are cheaper/the same price. I'd like to understand if it's the same there.
I live in the UK, and our weekly shop has gotten a lot more expensive than the 14%. Me and my wife did the calculation literally last month and our weekly Tesco order has gone up from £50 to £70-80. We both follow a relatively strict diet so we just order the same stuff each week, and the increases are small but they are on everything and they add up.
To give a simplest example - 4 pint milk bottle used to be £1.10 earlier in the year, now it's £1.55(and that's a cheap milk, nothing fancy) - that's an increase of 40% on milk alone.
Oh and to add to this - energy is bonkers. Last year I used to pay 3p/kWh for gas(the heating kind, not petrol), and 12p/kWh for electricity. Now it's 10p/kWh for gas and 34p/kWh for electricity with much higher standing charge(daily payment for being connected to the network) for both. In effect our energy bill tripled from £100 a month to £300 a month.
>I live in the UK, and our weekly shop has gotten a lot more expensive than the 14%. Me and my wife did the calculation literally last month and our weekly Tesco order has gone up from £50 to £70-80.
Anecdotes like this (ie. "government says inflation is x% but my grocery bill went up y%", x < y) seems to be very popular. Why is there a discrepancy? Is there some sort of methodological issue on the part of government agencies (or in this case, private data providers)? Or is there some sort of sampling/recall bias on the part of internet commenters?
I am relatively highly paid and short of shamefully I never really paid much attention to prices when doing a shop (I live by myself, only occasionally have friends or girlfriend staying over so shop was never huge % of my monthly budget)
Recently i've been shopping a few times and when paying i've thought "holy shit _how_ much did X thing cost". Cheese is the big one.
One also noticeable thing is security tags on food items that never had them before, meat, the aforementioned cheese, even some deserts.
Seems like a lot of items are shrinking too. I never drink Lucozade (a sugary drink here) but when I walk past it I notice the bottles are only about 90% filled now.
We are very fortunate that on my salary we can put about £1000 a month into savings in a normal month. But in the last couple of months it's gone down to maybe £500. Partly because my partner is on maternity leave but mostly due to bills and mortgage going up.
I feel hugely sorry for those people who's finances don't have that buffer built in. It must be a scary time when there is almost nothing left to cut and you are still being expected to pay more.
In a supermarket beverages like Lucozade should have a price tag indicating the price per 100ml so you can compare that irrespective of whether the containers are filled. Most packaged products that make sense to measure in mass or volume units work the same (but the unit required is different for spices than for flour, for vanilla essence versus water, because you don't buy 5 kilos of nutmeg or 10ml of water)
The cheapest of something has become much more expensive, whereas the middle range has only gone up a little.
e.g. Aldi:
250g cheapest butter was £1.45 now £1.95
250g premium butter was £1.95 now £2.10
That's an 8% increase for me because I always bought the nice stuff anyway and I continue to but it's a 35% increase for someone who was already buying the cheapest item.
One tiny example I was frustrated by recently... soy sauce. You used to be able to get light / dark / reduced salt / premium versions of soy sauce in most supermarkets.
Recently I had a couple of weeks where I couldn't find any at all, and now it's down to just a single brand of supermarket own dark soy sauce.
It looks like stuff that has higher margins go up less. With higher margins, sellers can still profit the same price per unit (even if that profit has less purchasing power) than items with smaller margins.
It's more nuanced in the UK too, the headline figure is calculated on a "basket" of goods each of which might change in price individually. I didn't find the exact contents and weightings, but there's an article on it here with a little widget that highlights some of the changes at various points in last ~100 years: https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/arti...
Doing the weekly food shop over the last 12 months has felt reasonably nuts. For the most part, we usually get the same stuff each week (fruit/veg/meat/dried food etc...) and it's gone from being about £100 to almost £170. Fruit and veg prices in particular seem really crazy.
For a while now food has seemed to be getting more expensive very quickly so this isn’t a surprise. It’s very easy to spend £50 on just a bag or two of groceries (albeit buying some fancy stuff).
Cheaper items have gone up a lot. They are still cheap in absolute terms (55p for six pitta breads) but the price increase is very difficult for people on the breadline.
The UK’s inflation problem is compounded by the fact that wages have stagnated for over a decade now. Salaries are really quite low. Only 15% of income tax payers are on the higher rate (over £50k). That was sort of manageable during the period of low interest rates but I really don’t know what people are going to do now.
I am a lead frontend engineer. I am in the very high salary percentile, probably top %2-3, excluding CEOs. I can barely save.
I don't have a car. I don't have any expensive hobbies, gym subscription or anything.
I am paying %50 of my salary to rent & bills in Zone 1, Angel, Islington. I keep looking for alternatives, but rents have gone further up since I got in 6 months ago.
Maybe I don't understand the UK real estate market, but how in the world is this possible? I live in one of the most expensive retail and commercial areas in the world (NYC), and my rent is maybe 30% of my post-tax take-home.
A noticeable feature of the Sainsbury’s website is that weights encoded in the URLs don’t change with the weight in the webpage as shrinkflation happens. So the following link to 115g of ham still has 125g in the link itself:
Thanks for asking this question. For what it's worth, the general sentiment in the answers feels very similar to what I'm seeing in the US, where my grocery bill has gone up about 40% in the past year.
My general hypothesis has been that since grocery costs make up a relatively small percentage of overall budgets in affluent urban areas that stores have more room to increase prices. I'm curious what is happening in more urban areas where people are on tighter in budgets to begin with.
That’s just one way of masking it. Here in Poland someone leaked a conversation with a premium dog food producer who admitted adding some dubious stuff into their food to maintain current price. I just found out had some cans in my storage (this thing lasts for years) and notice the aroma and texture difference to current units is extremely obvious.
I've noticed this for "junk" goods in the US (e.g. candy and chips), but less so for normal groceries (since most things are sold in common sizes, or have distinctive shapes). Is it your impression that shrinkflation is happening uniformly, or is it isolated to particular goods?
It's painful. Within my late 20's age group, the number one topic of conversation seems to be a lack money. It's impossible to get my group of friends together at the moment as everyone is scraping the barrel. Most are starting to accrue pretty large amounts of debt to get by. I've spent the last 6 months cutting my subscriptions, nights out, shopping, and I'm still spending more than my take-home most months.
---
To give some context, here's a completely honest account of my last months spending which was only a little above average the last 9 months:
£926 in bills (£750 rent; the rest in assorted council tax, utilities, phone, insurance etc).
- Up £70 YoY, driven by gas/electric.
£270 in groceries.
- Up £100.
£280 in entertainment (rugby/gig/festival tickets, books, a day out to a local town, trip to the movies, spotify and audible).
- Up about £50, although this is highly variable month to month.
£400 on eating out (birthday meal, pub with friends, date night, a couple of takeaways, and one regretfully expensive night out).
- Way up, about £150, driven by the cost of drinking and eating out. This is the one I'm looking to drive down the most.
£180 in transport (fuel and public transport).
- About the same, but only because I avoid driving anywhere as much as possible. If I still drove to work, this would be double. My car needs repairs but I'm putting it off.
£130 on shopping (clothes, birthday gifts).
- The same, due to a reduction in spending. I shop almost entirely second-hand now.
All in all, I'm spending about £400 a month more, while doing and purchasing much less.
--
I earn ~40k a year as an electronics engineer. My take home after tax (12% earnings taken for national insurance, 20% for income), student loan (9% for undergrad, and another 6% for post-grad), and 10% for stock EPP (which I can sell every 6 months), was £1850 (this shifts around with bonuses). I used to socialise 3-4 days a week and managed to put away £200 a month minimum. Now I socialise once every 10 days roughly, and I'm down the same. Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware there's still things I can do to squirrel some money away, but I'm trying to hold on to some sort of QoL together.
The median income for 22-29 y/o group in the UK is £24,600. I'm privileged enough to only have to worry about losing my social life. I dread to think how badly things are going for everyone else.
I guess that sunflower was more like 7.99 few months ago, and practically impossible to find (and its equivalents like colza or grape seed).
We shop across the border in France and I see similar trends. Since family of 4 and tons of kid-related items, before we practically never hit 200 euro mark for big weekly shopping unless adding something special 1-off. Now we are more like 250 euro and even higher, and I keep putting the +-same things in the shopping cart.
From an anecdotal perspective it's just applying more and more pressure on people I know. Food bank usage is sky rocketing and I'm seeing a lot more requests from them as a result as they're struggling to keep up with the demand.
The UK has heavy class divides and things are getting really difficult for those in the working class. For those in the middle class they're not struggling with food or fuel, but the ability to build wealth and invest is starting to erode.
Electricity is much more expensive than its ever been. 60-odd percent comes from gas turbines. That drives the raw cost of everything up.
It's definitely gradual, and many things with margins are losing profits rather than just doubling in price, but if this effect is sustained, many businesses just won't be able to afford to stay open.
If it's a cold winter, many will suffer in cold. We turned our heating on for a few hours a couple of days ago and it cost £7 (for mere hours). We can afford this, many can't.
Our mortgage repayments doubled recently. We now pay less into savings. It's fixed for another 2 years but who knows where we'll be after that.
So yeah, the worst is yet to come and I think we all know it.
In the UK and a bit anal about expenses (track every expense for the last 10 years).
I can only speak about groceries. I paid around £200 more per month for the same basket, which is consistent with the claim. Eating out is definitely more expensive and probably around 20-25%.
Everything else, I'm a bit of an outlier, I rent but luckily pay the same for a long time, actively using less heating, not a big goods consumer in general.
Others have already commented on food and energy, but the one that stood out to me was regional holiday accommodation - weekend getaway stuff. Feels substantially up from prior years - way about the 14.7% quoted. Almost like covid reset it to far higher.
Grocery prices have been going up a lot, and for a lot longer than just the last year. "Shrinkflation" is a thing too. I just bought a packet of hobnobs which has to be 2/3rds the size of a normal packet from a year or two ago.
Honestly the only place I've noticed it is the petrol pump. Fuel prices shot up dramatically early in the year. They're back down now from the peak, but still higher than they were a year ago.
This has me curious: has the UK's gas prices gone up consistently with "normal" inflation, or have they stayed relatively static against it until now?
Gas is already cheap in the US, but it's actually cheaper in real terms (adjusting for inflation and engine efficiency) to drive in 2022 than it was in ~2005. Is it the same there?
Prices are a bit higher but it varies from item to item. Nothing seems that out of reach mind. I think my weekly food shop has gone from £50-£55 to £65-£70.
Lots of scaremongering, lots of panicked news article but nothing tangible i've seen on the ground.
Inflation unexpectedly dipped to 9.9% in August, down from 10.1% in July, on the back of a fuel price decline.
Increasing food, transport and energy prices were the biggest contributing factors to inflation, the ONS said. Food was up 14.6% year-on-year, transport was up 10.9% compared to last year, while the price of furniture and household goods rose 10.8%.
As european countries scramble to buy energy so their local economies can keep the lights on, it will of course raise energy prices that other countries use to buy and ship things.
There's a game to played here on which country receives most of the pain, but everyone loses in absolute terms.
It's not UK, but I get the feeling this isn't so much inflation as opportunistic behavior. See grocery corporation CEOs bragging about price gouging under the cover of "inflation" during investor calls, https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/17/united-states-vs-vons/#pr...
>As Kroger CEO told his shareholders: "a little bit of inflation is always good in our business" because it lets him raise prices and "customers don’t overly react."
>It's not UK, but I get the feeling this isn't so much inflation as opportunistic behavior
It's not "opportunistic behavior", it's basic market dynamics when supply outstrips demand. Here's a simplistic model: if the world oil supply was halved because all the oil wells in the middle east blew up, then any price increases will be pure profit for every other oil producer. It tempting to say that oil producers shouldn't raise their prices because their costs haven't increased, but not increasing prices lead to other problems. If oil supply was halved and demand remained the same, then there's going to be oil shortages. We tried that in the 70s (eg. oil price caps) and that led to massive lines at the pump. Today we have floating oil prices and gas lines basically never happen, short of in natural disasters.
This is precisely why I have cut back to only staple ingredients. I refuse to give them the premiums they've artificially put on top of actual inflation because there are is so little competition in the market. I've learned to cook a lot better as well. I just don't participate any more in name brands/movies/etc I wait on the cheap version of stuff now and find that I'm not really missing out on anything.
The problem is that they get you in the long run when inflation erodes away the money you would have saved. There needs to be some sort of stable way of transferring that value into a medium that can retain it. I don't think anything exists that can satisfy this requirement. Everything i've seen (Bitcoin, gold, etc.) has not cut the mustard.
Inflation is prices rising and people willing to pay them. It isn't gouging for if Mars wants to raise the price of a snickers 50 cents when their costs only rise 25 cents. That is them adjusting to the market. If money wasn't sloshing around people would go. I don't need a 50 cent more snickers bar or I will by a cheaper substitute good (pork instead of steak) and prices wouldn't rise as much. But the consumer is willing to pay more hence the price goes up.
It's (likely) exacerbated by the pound tanking, the Eurozone is similarly affected. I visited Switzerland recently after a year off and the price hikes are there too, but not as noticeable as in other countries in Europe.
Readit News
At least for the US, it's a lot more nuanced than "inflation is X%" -- certain things are consistently more expensive, others are more variable, and others yet are cheaper/the same price. I'd like to understand if it's the same there.
To give a simplest example - 4 pint milk bottle used to be £1.10 earlier in the year, now it's £1.55(and that's a cheap milk, nothing fancy) - that's an increase of 40% on milk alone.
Oh and to add to this - energy is bonkers. Last year I used to pay 3p/kWh for gas(the heating kind, not petrol), and 12p/kWh for electricity. Now it's 10p/kWh for gas and 34p/kWh for electricity with much higher standing charge(daily payment for being connected to the network) for both. In effect our energy bill tripled from £100 a month to £300 a month.
Anecdotes like this (ie. "government says inflation is x% but my grocery bill went up y%", x < y) seems to be very popular. Why is there a discrepancy? Is there some sort of methodological issue on the part of government agencies (or in this case, private data providers)? Or is there some sort of sampling/recall bias on the part of internet commenters?
Recently i've been shopping a few times and when paying i've thought "holy shit _how_ much did X thing cost". Cheese is the big one.
One also noticeable thing is security tags on food items that never had them before, meat, the aforementioned cheese, even some deserts.
Seems like a lot of items are shrinking too. I never drink Lucozade (a sugary drink here) but when I walk past it I notice the bottles are only about 90% filled now.
I feel hugely sorry for those people who's finances don't have that buffer built in. It must be a scary time when there is almost nothing left to cut and you are still being expected to pay more.
e.g. Aldi:
250g cheapest butter was £1.45 now £1.95
250g premium butter was £1.95 now £2.10
That's an 8% increase for me because I always bought the nice stuff anyway and I continue to but it's a 35% increase for someone who was already buying the cheapest item.
One tiny example I was frustrated by recently... soy sauce. You used to be able to get light / dark / reduced salt / premium versions of soy sauce in most supermarkets.
Recently I had a couple of weeks where I couldn't find any at all, and now it's down to just a single brand of supermarket own dark soy sauce.
Cheaper items have gone up a lot. They are still cheap in absolute terms (55p for six pitta breads) but the price increase is very difficult for people on the breadline.
The UK’s inflation problem is compounded by the fact that wages have stagnated for over a decade now. Salaries are really quite low. Only 15% of income tax payers are on the higher rate (over £50k). That was sort of manageable during the period of low interest rates but I really don’t know what people are going to do now.
From memory, in my local supermarket for example,
tea is still about 0.90/1.00 a box.
Freshly squeezed orange juice has gone from about 1.60 to 2.20
Butter has gone up a lot (don't have numbers)
chocolate biscuits not much increase (why not?)
milk prices are higher for organic, not so much increase on non-organic.
Fruit and vegetables a bit higher maybe, but not that noticeable as yet.
I can't think of much that's gone down, but it might have done.
edit: found and correct juice price 2.30->2.20
Was pretty stable (over years) at:
Now: and that's where it's settled, was pretty volatile (up to a pound or so higher) for a while.What's curious to me is that milk & cheese don't seem to have gone up so much nor been so volatile.
I don't have a car. I don't have any expensive hobbies, gym subscription or anything.
I am paying %50 of my salary to rent & bills in Zone 1, Angel, Islington. I keep looking for alternatives, but rents have gone further up since I got in 6 months ago.
\www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-british-cooked-ham-125g
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-briti...
My general hypothesis has been that since grocery costs make up a relatively small percentage of overall budgets in affluent urban areas that stores have more room to increase prices. I'm curious what is happening in more urban areas where people are on tighter in budgets to begin with.
[0]https://www.iceland.co.uk/p/the-fish-market-cod-fillets-320g... (3 for £10! - I stocked some in the fridge as well!) [1]https://www.iceland.co.uk/p/garden-of-elveden-baby-salad-pot... [2]https://www.iceland.co.uk/p/iceland-button-sprouts-900g/8369... [3]https://www.iceland.co.uk/p/iceland-broccoli-florets-800g/83...
If you cook yourself it's all good.
Our monthly grocery bill is actually less because we switched to Lidl, Tesco and Iceland. We do notice higher energy bills but it's still manageable.
Petrol and energy are WAY more expensive.
Everything is just more pricey at the moment.
---
To give some context, here's a completely honest account of my last months spending which was only a little above average the last 9 months:
£926 in bills (£750 rent; the rest in assorted council tax, utilities, phone, insurance etc).
- Up £70 YoY, driven by gas/electric.
£270 in groceries.
- Up £100.
£280 in entertainment (rugby/gig/festival tickets, books, a day out to a local town, trip to the movies, spotify and audible).
- Up about £50, although this is highly variable month to month.
£400 on eating out (birthday meal, pub with friends, date night, a couple of takeaways, and one regretfully expensive night out).
- Way up, about £150, driven by the cost of drinking and eating out. This is the one I'm looking to drive down the most.
£180 in transport (fuel and public transport).
- About the same, but only because I avoid driving anywhere as much as possible. If I still drove to work, this would be double. My car needs repairs but I'm putting it off.
£130 on shopping (clothes, birthday gifts).
- The same, due to a reduction in spending. I shop almost entirely second-hand now.
All in all, I'm spending about £400 a month more, while doing and purchasing much less.
--
I earn ~40k a year as an electronics engineer. My take home after tax (12% earnings taken for national insurance, 20% for income), student loan (9% for undergrad, and another 6% for post-grad), and 10% for stock EPP (which I can sell every 6 months), was £1850 (this shifts around with bonuses). I used to socialise 3-4 days a week and managed to put away £200 a month minimum. Now I socialise once every 10 days roughly, and I'm down the same. Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware there's still things I can do to squirrel some money away, but I'm trying to hold on to some sort of QoL together.
The median income for 22-29 y/o group in the UK is £24,600. I'm privileged enough to only have to worry about losing my social life. I dread to think how badly things are going for everyone else.
Barilla pasta, 500g: 0.75 -> 1.49
Basmati rice, 1kg: 1.99 -> 2.69
White sugar, 1kg: 0.45 -> 1.35
White flour, 1kg: 0.39 -> 0.55
Sunflower oil, 1 liter: 0.99 -> 3.99
We shop across the border in France and I see similar trends. Since family of 4 and tons of kid-related items, before we practically never hit 200 euro mark for big weekly shopping unless adding something special 1-off. Now we are more like 250 euro and even higher, and I keep putting the +-same things in the shopping cart.
The UK has heavy class divides and things are getting really difficult for those in the working class. For those in the middle class they're not struggling with food or fuel, but the ability to build wealth and invest is starting to erode.
It's definitely gradual, and many things with margins are losing profits rather than just doubling in price, but if this effect is sustained, many businesses just won't be able to afford to stay open.
If it's a cold winter, many will suffer in cold. We turned our heating on for a few hours a couple of days ago and it cost £7 (for mere hours). We can afford this, many can't.
Our mortgage repayments doubled recently. We now pay less into savings. It's fixed for another 2 years but who knows where we'll be after that.
So yeah, the worst is yet to come and I think we all know it.
I can only speak about groceries. I paid around £200 more per month for the same basket, which is consistent with the claim. Eating out is definitely more expensive and probably around 20-25%.
Everything else, I'm a bit of an outlier, I rent but luckily pay the same for a long time, actively using less heating, not a big goods consumer in general.
Gas is already cheap in the US, but it's actually cheaper in real terms (adjusting for inflation and engine efficiency) to drive in 2022 than it was in ~2005. Is it the same there?
Lots of scaremongering, lots of panicked news article but nothing tangible i've seen on the ground.
Inflation unexpectedly dipped to 9.9% in August, down from 10.1% in July, on the back of a fuel price decline.
Increasing food, transport and energy prices were the biggest contributing factors to inflation, the ONS said. Food was up 14.6% year-on-year, transport was up 10.9% compared to last year, while the price of furniture and household goods rose 10.8%.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/10/19/uk-inflation-rate-rises-to-1...
There's a game to played here on which country receives most of the pain, but everyone loses in absolute terms.
>Questions are now being raised over how long Truss will remain in office
>As Kroger CEO told his shareholders: "a little bit of inflation is always good in our business" because it lets him raise prices and "customers don’t overly react."
Over 50% of the rise in prices for groceries during the pandemic are from corporate profits. Raises in input costs (38%) and labor (7%) made up most of the rest. When the price raise is 50% increased profit during a time where a large fraction cannot afford enough to eat this is price gouging. It is extremely clear. https://www.salon.com/2022/10/19/katie-porter-pulls-out-char... https://porter.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID...
It's not "opportunistic behavior", it's basic market dynamics when supply outstrips demand. Here's a simplistic model: if the world oil supply was halved because all the oil wells in the middle east blew up, then any price increases will be pure profit for every other oil producer. It tempting to say that oil producers shouldn't raise their prices because their costs haven't increased, but not increasing prices lead to other problems. If oil supply was halved and demand remained the same, then there's going to be oil shortages. We tried that in the 70s (eg. oil price caps) and that led to massive lines at the pump. Today we have floating oil prices and gas lines basically never happen, short of in natural disasters.
https://www.kantar.com/uki/inspiration/fmcg/2022-wp-uk-groce...
I assume that it's a combination of the war in Ukraine and other factors contributing to inflation.
And that people will respond saying the war has nothing to do with it. But I think they are in denial.
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