Thanks to NPR for this important reporting; it sucks that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down after losing all of its funding.
This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items! It seems to me like there must be organizations out there with tons and tons of price and consumer spending data for thousands and thousands of items, right? It should be possible to get much more comprehensive measurement of price changes over time vs and approach taken like this one (or the CPI, for that matter).
I think the ALICE index is great for tracking pure essentials and survivability, which is definitely important, but it's also not unreasonable to track things that aren't 100% essential.
My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.
Absolutely. You need both. The point I’m trying to make is that we only have CPI which drives most policy decisions. However when you need about $40k to just survive and 1/3 of the households make less than $50k before taxes, you also need something like this to make effective policy decisions. Social security payments are a great example. If you adjust them only based on CPI, and essentials get more expensive at a higher rate than non essentials, you create a system where over a period of time, social security payments would barely cover the essentials.
The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly:
People could save so much money if they bought used instead of new more often, especially toys. It's crazy how much garbage we produce basically just because we literally don't share our toys.
In the grand scheme of things, toys are cheap and kids are huge influences on parents. I don't think pinching pennies on toys will change much unless that toy is an iPhone.
I have come away from Christmas with almost the opposite conclusion. I have 3 young kids, and I notice almost an inverse correlation between the number of toys around and how contently they play.
The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.
Toys/gifts are important, but you'll find most of what you need (baby toys to bicycles) for pennies on the dollar at your local yard sale, estate sale, or free as hand-me-downs from an older family.
I would hesitate to include the retail prices for these kinds of goods to a CPI type metric because the price are incredibly flexible.
So many that I can't play with all of them, most of them are broken, and I don't have time to fix them, so I get really depressed because they aren't usable when I want to play with them. Now I'm trying to get rid of most of them.
Mostly sarcastic, but I don't think it's a hot take to realize that the curtain has shifted substantially over the decades in terms of how to raise a child.
This isn't really indexing in the same way that the CPI is indexing.
Alice pulls medians from other surveys (so it uses what I assume to be CPI food and CPI housing data, though they may also use other things), and then includes childcare and healthcare costs with some (imo) pretty painful assumptions, and then tacks on a random 10% "misc" category. It does a good job of creating a very high estimate of costs. As one example, I looked at the housing cost for an suburb I'm familiar with, and it lists the housing cost for a single individual as nearly $1800, you can pretty easily find 1BR apartments for 1-1.2K in that area, and utilities aren't going to run $600/mo, and you can pretty easily go cheaper.
And then again after doing that it tacks on a "misc" 10% budget item. I wouldn't call it a good estimate of "what people really need" and also it consumes the basket of goods, it doesn't compare to it.
> Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.
1/3 of the households make less than $50k. Mean survival budget is $35k-40k. After taxes, if a third of the population can barely meet a survival budget, an index like this needs to be part of the overall economy.
And the point of the ALICE index is exactly to address what you are pointing out. When wages, social security etc. were increasing proportionally to the essential goods, it made sense to have the CPI include other goods and services, allowing policy makers to use it as a basis for policy directions. However, when essentials become expensive faster than non essentials, it creates a problem for policy makers. It explains the “vibeflation” where policy makers were pushing back hard on economic struggles that most people are feeling by pointing to CPI numbers that show a 2-3% inflation, meanwhile people are struggling and dipping into savings to make things work.
Beyond just the monthly/yearly changes are the cumulative affects of those changes and disparities of wage stagnation with record inflation over time. Increased rent/housing costs are also a massive factor.
Not even counting the number of households who are at credit card and other debt limits at close to 30% interest. Trump has given some lip service to trying to get this down to 10%, but it'll really take congress to make anything happen that has a chance of sticking.
Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. Consumer spending can therefore easily look great while most people are struggling to get by. There really is no “overall economy”, there are many many different stories happening all at once, and focusing on simple metrics lets you easily fool yourself.
> Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending.
It means increasingly focusing on the spending of the rich, because the population is increasingly richer. Proportion of families making more that 150k (in 2024 dollars) has gone from 5% in 1967 to 33% in 2024, while both middle class (50k-150k) and poor (<50k) have decreased. [1]
Great example. The population as a whole is richer like you say, and also the richest 10% account for half of consumer spending, compared to 36% 30 years ago. [1] So yes, consuming spending has become more of a metric of the wealthy’s spending habits.
No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees.
It doesn't make a lot of sense to measure the cost of entertainment in terms of monetary inflation though. Hugely price-tiered status-signaling goods like kids toys just don't respond to market forces in the same way commodities do.
Short of unrolling it all and weighing it by the pound the math involved in the cost of TP is complicated. That said, McDonald's use of discriminatory/surge pricing complicates the actual cost of a big mac too.
Even by the pound would be hard... quality two-ply vs low-grade gas station TP... The price per unit is also difficult to compare... are you getting the costco packs that still have the larger per-sheet area or the new, smaller sheets.
Not to mention, in general it might be a counter-intuitive index... If the spend per person on TP on average goes down, is that an uptake in bidets, lowered tp costs, or economic affects and people choosing cheaper options?
That said, I still think it could be a "fun" index to track over time.
Your retailer knows exactly how much you paid for shampoo. In most cases, they know it was exactly you who bought it. Data sharing agreements through direct or third parties complete the picture for both sides, retailer and card issuer.
It's fascinating to see such work. By the grace of NPR, apparently the "transient inflation" narrative is officially inoperative, and plebian concerns about the price of eggs are now worthy!
1. It sounds like you're just describing a larger "basket of goods"? That data is available, but also valuable, and I'm not sure why the basket of goods tracked by the CPI or NPR would be inadequate.
2. This specific exercise is designed to be relatable to individuals (in general, and specifically ones such as the people interviewed in the article who claimed that their grocery bill went up about 50% in a year, which is implausible to put it politely) so that they can understand the actual level of inflation rather than the one they imagined in their head.
The physical size of charmin changed during the pandemic.
Good to track this yearly since some standard metrics are useless versus the shrinkflation, reduction in quality ingredients, and other manipulation we’ll learn about sooner or later.
Many ice creams are now dairy desserts due to not having enough ingredients to make the cut. Same with milk chocolates and now declared chocolate candy due to not using enough real cocoa.
> The physical size of charmin changed during the pandemic.
This is generlly taken into account. From StatCan, who publishes Canada's CPI numbers:
> 7.10 Quantity adjustment entails accounting for changes in the quantity (e.g. package size, number of tissue ply, etc.) of observed POs. This is another implicit method of quality adjustment because it is assumed that the quality per standardized unit is the same over time.
> 7.11 Quantity adjustment is the default treatment for nearly all of the POs in the food major aggregate as well as some of the products in the household operations, and personal care supplies and equipment aggregates.
To account for possible changes in package sizes, we focused on the price per unit, whether it was an ounce of salsa or a square foot of aluminum foil.
It doesn't say that they accounted for possible changes in item quality. Tide detergent claims that their new 80-oz bottle of laundry detergent can wash 64 loads just like the previous 100-oz bottle because it's more concentrated, and I suppose NPR (if they'd retained a sample of the previous product) could have brought that to a chemistry lab to test and verify that claim, but I have no idea how you'd objectively prove that an ounce of salsa had truly remained the same product.
Sure, but they are accounting for size shrinkage which the original poster was saying they didn't.
I don't really know how you can account for quality either. User surveys? Ingredient sourcing? But then again I think this kind of reporting is just a general barometer. Some other comments are pointing to data sources that might do more of this.
The amount of detergent per load is set by the manufacturer, who can injection mold that measuring cup in whatever size they want. FTA:
> The amount of liquid had shrunk to 92 ounces from 100 ounces before the pandemic, and the price had risen by a dollar. After that, the cost stayed the same, but the contents shrank to 84 ounces in 2024 and then to 80 ounces in December.
> The label continuously promised enough detergent for 64 loads of laundry.
> ...Tide specifically got the "most significant upgrade to its liquid formula in over 20 years," according to the company, with a "boosted" level of active cleaning ingredients and updated dosage instructions.
> "The result is superior cleaning performance in a smaller dose," a Procter & Gamble representative said.
Do you take them at their word for that? I'm specifically wondering whether the 84 ounce, 64-load bottle with a cap that measures out 1.3125 ounces per load contains the exact same liquid as the 80 ounce, 64-load bottle with a cap that measures out 1.25 ounces per load. I prefer powder detergent with a prewash dose, I know my clothes get clean, but I don't know that anyone outside a lab would be able to inspect clothes post-wash and notice the difference in cleanliness caused by the removal of 0.0625 ounces of detergent.
They have three ways to protect or boost profits: Raise prices, decrease quantities, or decrease quality. NPR and the
My favored brand of coffee finally succumbed to the shrinkflation pressures. Most brands in my local grocery store moved to 10oz bags of whole beans. My favorite brand was still 12oz but some of their specialty offerings were in 10oz bags.
My last trip, they were all now 10oz bags too. As far as I can tell the bag size itself did not change, only the weighted contents. Read those labels people.
They can keep the sheets per roll the same and still give us less for the same price if they reduce the dimensions or thickness of the sheet too. They should just give us a weight assuming the paper is less expensive than the cardboard roll inside.
When every company at once throws it at you it seems like something different. Someone called it baffleware. It's all too much to track/account for/adjust to, so you just comply. Kind of like Trump and Project 2025, but it's being done on a corporate level on everything in our lives.
At least Walmart is likely to honor the price on the shelf. Dollar stores often just change prices without updating the shelf, so you don't know what you're going to pay until you get to the register. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
This is illegal in the UK (and we aren't even talking about the hidden tax surprise at US registers either), unsurprising to see it's normalised in the US.
I absolutely wish that prices were inclusive of tax in the US, but to be fair, it's not a "hidden tax surprise" to us, since it's been like that everywhere for our entire lives.
the price of name brand soda is outrageous. I remember when it was around a dollar a bottle not long ago, now it's basically 3 dollars a bottle. I can't think of a good explanation for this. It's water and subsidized corn syrup.
They're pricing at the point of pain, not maximizing efficiency. There are few enough companies (what, like, 3?) that own the majority of the brands so they don't even need to collude to figure out that they can all hover around "as high as we can get away with" together.
I've been nursing a minor Coke Zero addiction for years but usually get the store brand which is close enough at half the cost. For whatever reason Coke Zero itself dropped in price by about 30% recently but that's apparently not nationwide.
It really kind of blows my mind how much of that people drink. I'll get a 2 liter bottle that will last days and then I read about people going through entire cases of Mountain Dew Insane Flavor Combo Super Bacinator Blast in a day and it's like my god that's like 4000 kcals of corn syrup.
More importantly it is a significant source of calories. My brother quit soda years ago when he realized he was getting 1/3 of his daily calories from sugar - a little sugar is okay but you can't meet your daily nutrient needs when that much is from sugar. If it is just liquid soda is just as others (and probably better than alcohol), but there are other considerations.
> how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases
One confounding factor here is that oftentimes the price is only reasonable in bulk. I don't know about walmart, but around me the best deal typically is "buy 2 get 3 free". I rarely buy/drink soda, but on the occasions I buy at all I'll be getting many cases at a time.
It's totally "because they can". Even if you take marketing budgets into account I can't imagine it costs that much more to make a 2l of Diet Coke vs the store brands which still sell for $1 where I live
I buy soda syrup to make soda, but even that's gotten expensive. Funny thing is that I do it to reduce how much I was putting in recycling, but even with the extra state tax for bottles/cans, it actually costs me slightly more to make it myself.
I've had great results making my own mineral water clones though, so maybe I'll try making LabCoatz's coca cola clone syrup and see how it works with sucrolose or allulose.
It was intentional price gouging, but prices have become to come down after shareholders pressured CEOs to lower the prices in response to tepid sales numbers.
I prefer "greed". It's the much a simpler explanation that works just as well. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the demand for soda has stayed the same or even actually declined while the supply of corn and water hasn't bottomed out or gotten proportionately more expensive for soda companies.
The thing with inflation is that a product's individual components may cost the same or less over time, but the cost of everything else...like housing...doubles every couple of years. So you need to increase prices to support higher salaries, increasing minimum wage, etc. It's rides the line of becoming run away inflation since everyone needs to raise prices to support COL, then everything gets more expensive, then they need to raise prices again to support everything else getting more expensive. It's a loop that will never be closed
If you're buying individual bottles, you're paying for the refrigerator. Otherwise you buy boxes and it's still very cheap. Spindrift is $6.49 for an eight-pack and LaCroix is cheaper. I haven't bought Coke in a long time, sorry.
Beer has done the same thing. A few years ago I could get any of a number of beers at Costco for $1 per can/bottle in a 24 pack. Now the cheapest name brand offerings are $1.33 per can and even the Kirkland brand is over $1. If I buy it at a standard grocery store, those same beers are over $2 each.
FWIW, a frugal person can't simply think to eat whatever has declined in price... It's worth realizing that, for example, a 20% rise on the 0.33 ramen is still one of your cheapest options.
From my perspective (ie, in the USA) it can still be hella cheap if you're willing to cook food yourself from scratch. Rice, Beans, Lentils, and frozen veggies can give you the baseline of very nutritious meals (but boring af) for like $2 a day.
you can eat (all dry/unprepared weight) 100g white rice, 100g black beans, 100g black lentils, 225g frozen mixed veggies for about $1 if you buy in small bulk (like 2-5lbs at a time)
We're really sorely missing something like "semver for food".
I don't have deep food industry knowledge, IIRC there are some rules around SKUs needing to rotate in response to certain changes, but these are completely opaque to customers. People should know they're eating snickers 12.2.2, and while a sub-1% change to one ingredient's amount might be a patch bump, a 10% total weight reduction should absolutely trigger a major version bump. SKU and nutrition labels should be tied to a public changelog, and inaccuracies in that changelog should proportionally imperil manufacturer solvency.
I love this quote from Walmart describing loss leaders turned inside out.
A store, for example, might ... charge slightly more for several items in order to sell something else at a break-even price or even below cost.
Imagine,
Alice: "I think we can sell this plastic gizmo for 1000% markup"
Bob: "Wonderful, we can use those profits to lower prices on things people need!"
Swai is perhaps the worst possible fish to buy (low nutritional value, bad for environment, contains toxins) so (a) it's unfortunate they picked this fish and (b) it's good it's more expensive since perhaps people will buy less of it.
A recent job loss forced me to look harder at my own financials, and I was surprised just how much things like groceries accounts for in overall spending. I'm making a habit this year of, at the end of each day, recording what I spent and on what - so I can get better data.
I appreciate what NPR did here. Taking into account price per ounce/square foot/etc is essential so I'm glad they did.
It's useful to see these kinds of changes, can help make decisions. If company X is shrinking product Y, maybe it's time to look for an off-brand instead? That's what I'll be doing for a lot of things.
It would be interesting to see inflation indexes based on different typical buyers, to include the ultra rich. Basically, inflation isn't uniform and impacts people differently. Of course that brings up how you actually measure the impact of inflation to the ultra rich when the price of corn flakes is meaningless and their personal purchase are negligible. Maybe you look at how much the cost to buy a politician has gone up?
In general, if there's enough water to grow chocolate, then a relatively hot, empty state chooses to build single-family housing developments and five-lane roads.
> As affordability became Americans' top concern, big brands began to worry about shoppers switching to store-label competitors or skipping some purchases altogether.
I think, at least in the last year-or-so, big brands also became worried about getting flamed by the president for raising prices.
What a poorly-built site. There is a cookie banner covering a popover solicitation for donations, covering an inset photo/caption which itself is covered by a cookie banner (wtf?) ... closed the tab.
For the love of god- I can't understand why people buy paper towels. It makes zero sense. It's expensive, you throw it after a use. I started using cloth towels and life is so much better.
I don't use them frequently, but I love them for some things. In particular, my wife likes our cloths to look nice. This means wiping up something staining will make the cloths look worse. In those cases I pull out a paper towel. I could get black cloths to get around this, but she doesn't like those. So, here we are.
They're also useful when I need to use a harsh chemical that I don't want lingering on a household cloth my young kids might use on their bodies.
I've had the same roll for around a year, but it's almost exhausted. I think they're fine.
They're also very useful in a lab setting, but that's another matter.
We stopped using toilet paper during covid, got a bidet, and bought a couple hundred shop towels to dry our butts. Now we only buy toilet paper for guests, which happens maybe once a year after throwing several parties.
Then we also bought shop towels for the kitchen to replace paper towels. I love the shop towels so much.
The butt-towels are white, and we wash them with bleach, there's been zero problems doing this over the last ~6 years. If there happens to be a bit of excess poop on a towel (typically there is none at all), we just throw it out, we have hundreds. The kitchen towels are blue, so we don't mix them up with the butt-towels.
We have laundry baskets for each kind of shop towel. A small one in the bathrooms, a larger one in the kitchen for the kitchen towels. We have to wash the butt-towels maybe once a month, and about the same for the kitchen towels. It's a simple chore that takes practically none of our time, less than it would to go out and buy paper. No, the butt-towels do not smell at all, they dry quickly and there's never been any problem whatsoever.
It's so much better than spending multiple $100s of dollars a year on paper that literally gets flushed down the toilet or goes into the trash.
A few of our friends took notice and started doing this too.
Honestly, I don't know why we ever wiped our butts with toilet paper for so many years, it's just so... shitty. It's just not a good experience. When we travel we miss our bidet and shop towels so much, to the point that I've ordered a cheap bidet if I'm staying in an Airbnb for a week or more, and install it there, and leave it behind. $30 well spent.
Wages and energy have not increased. Tariffs on food are basically non existent for most items.
It's 100% purely supply side pricing, propped up by government spending and credit (which is largely backstopped by the government as well).
I listened to a podcast recently that some 'homeowners' have not made a mortgage payment in years, have no ability to pay, but here are essentially unlimited 'no doc' mortgage modifications available since the Corona time period.
> listened to a podcast recently that some 'homeowners' have not made a mortgage payment in years, have no ability to pay,
How? Somebody is holding the bag here on the mortgage - a bank, probably. And they are fine with not receiving payments? Or is somebody else making payments on the homeowner's behalf?
So, the basic process is 1) Borrow stops making payments. 2) Borrow goes into forbearance for 12 months just prior to foreclosure start. 3) Forbearance ends, borrower cannot make current. 4) FHA steps in to do loan modification. Essentially, they roll the forebeared balance into the loan, payoff the existing mortgage, and issue a new FHA-backed loan, without any income or payment ability qualifications. 5) Repeat the process again.
In judicial foreclosure states, the process can take 12 to 24 months, and longer if contested or if other periods apply. In nonjudicial states, timelines are shorter but still typically 4 to 9 months from default to sale.
Lenders incur legal fees, court costs, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, HOA dues, servicing advances, and loss of interest during the process. Industry estimates often put foreclosure costs in the tens of thousands of dollars per loan, excluding the loss from selling the property below the outstanding balance.
“Writing off the mortgage” is not the realistic alternative. Lenders generally compare foreclosure against loan modification, repayment plans, short sales, or deeds-in-lieu, because charge-offs are accounting outcomes after losses are realized, not an operational substitute for foreclosure.
Yeah, those are some of the programs I was referring to. The 'loophole' aspect that was mentioned on the podcast is that when the FHA does the 'loss mitigation' (aka, refi's the loan), there is not any kind of qualification as to whether the buyer will ever be able to make a payment on the new loan. It's just approved anyway, and the cycle can happen unlimited times.
I think they're looking at adding a means test, but I'm unsure.
It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people thought the president would make any really impact on inflation. That said, with global conditions improving it looks like we could've actually seen a drastically larger reduction in inflation if not for the tariffs. The goals of the tariffs seem so misaligned with what the country needs - again not surprising that we're doing something the opposite of what we need - and again also not surprising that his supporters don't seem to care.
I think the real issue is that for the powers that be, inflation is seen as either neutral or a good thing. The only people it hurts is the working class and the blame is nebulous. So it is used as a tool to increase taxes without changing laws, lower the cost of debt, and cut labor wages since they don't get pay raises commensurate with inflation. So I think it is a trick played upon the working class to screw them over in the long term while the wealthy are protected because all their assets simply go up in value with inflation. I think the target inflation rate should be 0%, not 2%. I simply don't believe the justification for the 2% target.
We're well above 2% anyway, I doubt they will ever hit that again - they are already having to cut rates because job market is frozen, and that will increase inflation pressure.
I track my spend each year and my personal actual inflation rate has averaged about 4.5% over past 5 years. And I'm pretty low income, my spending is all core stuff.
>It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people thought the president would make any really impact on inflation
Except that a president, in normal times, COULD make an impact on inflation, both directly and indirectly.
What is surprising, is that after a completely failed presidency that saw a marked decrease in middle class prosperity, people thought that Donald Trump, of all people, could bring inflation down.
If you try it at home you'll realise combining milk, butter and sugar in a bowl doesn't create ice cream. And when you figure out how to create ice cream you'll realise moving said ice cream to a place where you can sell it requires extra steps too
You also have to learn how to do it without adding things like listeria which seems like a difficult task for at least one brand after multiple rounds of recalls.
There’s more profit in frozen dairy dessert and at least some customers can’t tell the difference or prefer it. For the rest of us, we wait for a sale or ice cream becomes a special treat.
Ice cream is being priced too high if the ice cream sellers would make more money by decreasing the price of ice cream. If they wouldn't, it is appropriately priced.
Or, from the buyer's perspective, it is priced appropriately if the total amount buyers would spend on it would go down if the price is lowered or raised.
There isn't a correct intrinsic price that an object should be sold at that can be calculated based on the ingredients and labor. That idea is one of the fundamental flaws of Marxism. Price is a compromise between the buyers and sellers, based on the values of each.
This story is a fiction pitting the seller and buyer against each other in a context free vacuum. The reality is that between buyer and seller there are channels which are either under control of the seller or another powerfull third party. The playing field is very difficult to enter for new sellers and the number of sellers has been going down for a long time tilting the playing field more and more against the buyer.
Is it completely insane and incoherent to imagine a situation where ice cream has two equilibrium prices, one higher and one lower, and the market just settles on the higher one? Like, imagine a case where Jeni's would start losing money on every pint if they reduced the price by a dollar, but they'd make the same amount of money overall if they reduced it by 3. But they're in a local optimum, the "price reduced by 3" is identical for revenue purposes, and they choose their current local optimum. Then ice cream could still be priced too high and be "appropriately priced". Is this impossible?
> Is it completely insane and incoherent to imagine a situation where ice cream has two equilibrium prices, one higher and one lower, and the market just settles on the higher one?
It it completely insane? No. But draw a set of supply and demand curves that supports it, and then try to come up with a narrative that explains them. In the static, same time, all other things being equal case, it is hard to do.
I've reduced my ice cream intake close to 0 solely based on price. Specifically, I remember the prices from long ago to the current just under $10. To me, ice cream should not be the same price of a cheap bottle of wine or other alcohol as an example comparison. We all have our own individual red lines, but ice cream prices crossed mine some time ago
Healthy economies "should" have a reward for specialization where both supplier and purchaser win. There is no reward anymore for economic specialization in the context of ice cream; its cheaper to make your own, now. This is a troubling long term implication for any *-as-a-service
There's a second even worse economic implication in that ice cream has long been affordable to 100% of US households... Now due to permanent long term economic decline its seen as acceptable losses for some not to afford it anymore. Again, troubling long term implications.
1. Ice cream has never been affordable to 100% of US households.
2. I strongly suspect the couple in the article could afford ice cream if they brought less beef, less name brand items, or were just more savvy shoppers.
3. I don't know how you determined that it's cheaper to make your own ice cream, but I would say that's generally inaccurate based on personal experience and a basic assessment of input costs and a reasonable value on your time.
4. If you really feel like ice cream is overpriced, you have identified an opportunity!
First, I think you're probably right that ice cream is priced too high compared to its inputs.
But maybe there are other factors? What about energy? One would assume that ice cream has a higher energy requirement than other "treat" style products? Are there specific tariff impacts on ice cream manufacturing equipment?
Could be. But also, ice cream manufacturers buy their ingredients more cheaply than consumers do. It is very possible that the cost of milk/butter/sugar at Walmart reflect Walmart deciding to lower their profit margins on these items, even if the cost to Walmart has increased.
Or - Walmart is a big enough supplier that they have stable contracts with manufacturers, and are able to purchase their ingredients for the same cost as always, while Turkey Hill et al is competing over what's left. (Like Apple, buying up TSMC runs.)
Thanks to NPR for this important reporting; it sucks that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down after losing all of its funding.
This "basked of goods" approach to understanding price inflation seems outdated to me. 114 items! It seems to me like there must be organizations out there with tons and tons of price and consumer spending data for thousands and thousands of items, right? It should be possible to get much more comprehensive measurement of price changes over time vs and approach taken like this one (or the CPI, for that matter).
I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025?
There needs to be an index that reflects what people really need and the closest I’ve found is the ALICE index: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
I think the ALICE index is great for tracking pure essentials and survivability, which is definitely important, but it's also not unreasonable to track things that aren't 100% essential.
My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.
Absolutely. You need both. The point I’m trying to make is that we only have CPI which drives most policy decisions. However when you need about $40k to just survive and 1/3 of the households make less than $50k before taxes, you also need something like this to make effective policy decisions. Social security payments are a great example. If you adjust them only based on CPI, and essentials get more expensive at a higher rate than non essentials, you create a system where over a period of time, social security payments would barely cover the essentials.
> I’ve had a gripe with “basket of goods” approach. Does a household really care that much if the game of clue is 10% cheaper in 2025?
The game of Clue, and other games/toys, are in basket of goods because on average Americans spend some portion of their income per surveys:
* https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/
The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_models_are_wrong
I did not know about this, and it's excellent. Seems like a one-shot explanation for the "vibe-flation" phenomenon that many people find mystifying.
The CPI components are individually tracked and weighting is public. You can just play with the weights.
Toys for kids are absolutely a necessity in most households with kids.
People could save so much money if they bought used instead of new more often, especially toys. It's crazy how much garbage we produce basically just because we literally don't share our toys.
I think you mean, spend $0 instead, given how many folks are donating toys on local facebook groups
In the grand scheme of things, toys are cheap and kids are huge influences on parents. I don't think pinching pennies on toys will change much unless that toy is an iPhone.
I have come away from Christmas with almost the opposite conclusion. I have 3 young kids, and I notice almost an inverse correlation between the number of toys around and how contently they play.
The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.
Toys/gifts are important, but you'll find most of what you need (baby toys to bicycles) for pennies on the dollar at your local yard sale, estate sale, or free as hand-me-downs from an older family.
I would hesitate to include the retail prices for these kinds of goods to a CPI type metric because the price are incredibly flexible.
Only when you can afford them.
Why does your child need 34 or 35 toys? She can be happy with just one or two toys.
“Why don’t you just live like you’re destitute? So ungrateful?!”
How many toys do you have?
So many that I can't play with all of them, most of them are broken, and I don't have time to fix them, so I get really depressed because they aren't usable when I want to play with them. Now I'm trying to get rid of most of them.
"Back in my day, we had a cardboard box and a stick and didn't complain ..."
Now you'd get CPS called for the stick.
Mostly sarcastic, but I don't think it's a hot take to realize that the curtain has shifted substantially over the decades in terms of how to raise a child.
This isn't really indexing in the same way that the CPI is indexing.
Alice pulls medians from other surveys (so it uses what I assume to be CPI food and CPI housing data, though they may also use other things), and then includes childcare and healthcare costs with some (imo) pretty painful assumptions, and then tacks on a random 10% "misc" category. It does a good job of creating a very high estimate of costs. As one example, I looked at the housing cost for an suburb I'm familiar with, and it lists the housing cost for a single individual as nearly $1800, you can pretty easily find 1BR apartments for 1-1.2K in that area, and utilities aren't going to run $600/mo, and you can pretty easily go cheaper.
And then again after doing that it tacks on a "misc" 10% budget item. I wouldn't call it a good estimate of "what people really need" and also it consumes the basket of goods, it doesn't compare to it.
Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.
There's value in the index you described as well, but IMO it doesn't make sense to use it as the basis for the overall economy.
> Most households are able to afford more than the essentials and do care about the cost of entertainment.
1/3 of the households make less than $50k. Mean survival budget is $35k-40k. After taxes, if a third of the population can barely meet a survival budget, an index like this needs to be part of the overall economy.
And the point of the ALICE index is exactly to address what you are pointing out. When wages, social security etc. were increasing proportionally to the essential goods, it made sense to have the CPI include other goods and services, allowing policy makers to use it as a basis for policy directions. However, when essentials become expensive faster than non essentials, it creates a problem for policy makers. It explains the “vibeflation” where policy makers were pushing back hard on economic struggles that most people are feeling by pointing to CPI numbers that show a 2-3% inflation, meanwhile people are struggling and dipping into savings to make things work.
We need to have both.
Beyond just the monthly/yearly changes are the cumulative affects of those changes and disparities of wage stagnation with record inflation over time. Increased rent/housing costs are also a massive factor.
Not even counting the number of households who are at credit card and other debt limits at close to 30% interest. Trump has given some lip service to trying to get this down to 10%, but it'll really take congress to make anything happen that has a chance of sticking.
A lot of people are very underwater.
Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending. Consumer spending can therefore easily look great while most people are struggling to get by. There really is no “overall economy”, there are many many different stories happening all at once, and focusing on simple metrics lets you easily fool yourself.
> Thinking about the “overall economy” increasingly means focusing on the spending of the rich, and ignoring the poor and struggling. A consequence of increasing inequality is the rich make up more and more consumer spending.
It means increasingly focusing on the spending of the rich, because the population is increasingly richer. Proportion of families making more that 150k (in 2024 dollars) has gone from 5% in 1967 to 33% in 2024, while both middle class (50k-150k) and poor (<50k) have decreased. [1]
[1] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dtoi!,f_auto,q_auto:...
Great example. The population as a whole is richer like you say, and also the richest 10% account for half of consumer spending, compared to 36% 30 years ago. [1] So yes, consuming spending has become more of a metric of the wealthy’s spending habits.
No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
It doesn't make a lot of sense to measure the cost of entertainment in terms of monetary inflation though. Hugely price-tiered status-signaling goods like kids toys just don't respond to market forces in the same way commodities do.
The Economist tried to solve this in the past with https://www.economist.com/interactive/big-mac-index (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index for non-subscribers)
I often toyed with the thought of a TP index... literally the spend on something you use to wipe crap off your rear and throw away.
Short of unrolling it all and weighing it by the pound the math involved in the cost of TP is complicated. That said, McDonald's use of discriminatory/surge pricing complicates the actual cost of a big mac too.
Even by the pound would be hard... quality two-ply vs low-grade gas station TP... The price per unit is also difficult to compare... are you getting the costco packs that still have the larger per-sheet area or the new, smaller sheets.
Not to mention, in general it might be a counter-intuitive index... If the spend per person on TP on average goes down, is that an uptake in bidets, lowered tp costs, or economic affects and people choosing cheaper options?
That said, I still think it could be a "fun" index to track over time.
Credit card companies have all of this data. They could track classes of spending and regress out rising incomes, age, etc.
I’m just how exactly does my credit card company know how much I paid for shampoo?
Your retailer knows exactly how much you paid for shampoo. In most cases, they know it was exactly you who bought it. Data sharing agreements through direct or third parties complete the picture for both sides, retailer and card issuer.
> Thanks to NPR for this important reporting
It's fascinating to see such work. By the grace of NPR, apparently the "transient inflation" narrative is officially inoperative, and plebian concerns about the price of eggs are now worthy!
Will wonders never cease?
1. It sounds like you're just describing a larger "basket of goods"? That data is available, but also valuable, and I'm not sure why the basket of goods tracked by the CPI or NPR would be inadequate.
2. This specific exercise is designed to be relatable to individuals (in general, and specifically ones such as the people interviewed in the article who claimed that their grocery bill went up about 50% in a year, which is implausible to put it politely) so that they can understand the actual level of inflation rather than the one they imagined in their head.
https://www.spins.com/
The physical size of charmin changed during the pandemic.
Good to track this yearly since some standard metrics are useless versus the shrinkflation, reduction in quality ingredients, and other manipulation we’ll learn about sooner or later.
Many ice creams are now dairy desserts due to not having enough ingredients to make the cut. Same with milk chocolates and now declared chocolate candy due to not using enough real cocoa.
> The physical size of charmin changed during the pandemic.
This is generlly taken into account. From StatCan, who publishes Canada's CPI numbers:
> 7.10 Quantity adjustment entails accounting for changes in the quantity (e.g. package size, number of tissue ply, etc.) of observed POs. This is another implicit method of quality adjustment because it is assumed that the quality per standardized unit is the same over time.
> 7.11 Quantity adjustment is the default treatment for nearly all of the POs in the food major aggregate as well as some of the products in the household operations, and personal care supplies and equipment aggregates.
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/62-553-x/2023001/chap-7-...
* https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/catalogue/62-553-X
In the article it says:
To account for possible changes in package sizes, we focused on the price per unit, whether it was an ounce of salsa or a square foot of aluminum foil.
It doesn't say that they accounted for possible changes in item quality. Tide detergent claims that their new 80-oz bottle of laundry detergent can wash 64 loads just like the previous 100-oz bottle because it's more concentrated, and I suppose NPR (if they'd retained a sample of the previous product) could have brought that to a chemistry lab to test and verify that claim, but I have no idea how you'd objectively prove that an ounce of salsa had truly remained the same product.
Sure, but they are accounting for size shrinkage which the original poster was saying they didn't.
I don't really know how you can account for quality either. User surveys? Ingredient sourcing? But then again I think this kind of reporting is just a general barometer. Some other comments are pointing to data sources that might do more of this.
Laundry detergent is usually priced as cents per load by savvy shoppers. That would factor out smaller doses.
The amount of detergent per load is set by the manufacturer, who can injection mold that measuring cup in whatever size they want. FTA:
> The amount of liquid had shrunk to 92 ounces from 100 ounces before the pandemic, and the price had risen by a dollar. After that, the cost stayed the same, but the contents shrank to 84 ounces in 2024 and then to 80 ounces in December.
> The label continuously promised enough detergent for 64 loads of laundry.
> ...Tide specifically got the "most significant upgrade to its liquid formula in over 20 years," according to the company, with a "boosted" level of active cleaning ingredients and updated dosage instructions.
> "The result is superior cleaning performance in a smaller dose," a Procter & Gamble representative said.
Do you take them at their word for that? I'm specifically wondering whether the 84 ounce, 64-load bottle with a cap that measures out 1.3125 ounces per load contains the exact same liquid as the 80 ounce, 64-load bottle with a cap that measures out 1.25 ounces per load. I prefer powder detergent with a prewash dose, I know my clothes get clean, but I don't know that anyone outside a lab would be able to inspect clothes post-wash and notice the difference in cleanliness caused by the removal of 0.0625 ounces of detergent.
They have three ways to protect or boost profits: Raise prices, decrease quantities, or decrease quality. NPR and the
At some point it will be concentrated it'll be powder again ;-)
I'm not sure if it's a national thing, but Hardees/Carl's Jr Large Cup sizes slowly decreased in volume until they matched the McDonald's Large Cups.
There's been plenty of volume gaming as costs and prices have risen.
My favored brand of coffee finally succumbed to the shrinkflation pressures. Most brands in my local grocery store moved to 10oz bags of whole beans. My favorite brand was still 12oz but some of their specialty offerings were in 10oz bags.
My last trip, they were all now 10oz bags too. As far as I can tell the bag size itself did not change, only the weighted contents. Read those labels people.
I rarely eat pork, but saw some ridiculously cheap bacon at the store last week.
When I got home I noticed it was 12oz instead of the (historical) norm 16oz.
"Pack contains 6 Mega Rolls (224 Sheets Per Roll) of Charmin Ultra Soft Toilet Paper"
to
"MEGA ROLLS, MEGA VALUE: Pack contains 6 Mega Rolls (208 Sheets Per Roll) of Charmin Ultra Soft Toilet Paper"
Everyone saw that coming when they changed roll sizes and reframed it, right?
Toilet paper math is the hardest kind of math. According to the print on various different packages of Charmin, and I could not make this up:
12 Mega Plus rolls = 54 Regular rolls
30 Double Plus rolls = 68 Regular rolls
12 Super Mega rolls = 72 Regular rolls
18 Mega rolls = 72 Regular rolls usually, but sometimes are sold as "Bonus Mega = 82 Regular rolls"
They can keep the sheets per roll the same and still give us less for the same price if they reduce the dimensions or thickness of the sheet too. They should just give us a weight assuming the paper is less expensive than the cardboard roll inside.
In other words: enshitification ensues!
When every company at once throws it at you it seems like something different. Someone called it baffleware. It's all too much to track/account for/adjust to, so you just comply. Kind of like Trump and Project 2025, but it's being done on a corporate level on everything in our lives.
At least Walmart is likely to honor the price on the shelf. Dollar stores often just change prices without updating the shelf, so you don't know what you're going to pay until you get to the register. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/03/customers-pa...
This is illegal in the UK (and we aren't even talking about the hidden tax surprise at US registers either), unsurprising to see it's normalised in the US.
I absolutely wish that prices were inclusive of tax in the US, but to be fair, it's not a "hidden tax surprise" to us, since it's been like that everywhere for our entire lives.
Going out and checking prices independently of official numbers has been thing for a while:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
Generally peer-reviewed papers have shown the official CPI numbers are fairly accurate.
the price of name brand soda is outrageous. I remember when it was around a dollar a bottle not long ago, now it's basically 3 dollars a bottle. I can't think of a good explanation for this. It's water and subsidized corn syrup.
They're pricing at the point of pain, not maximizing efficiency. There are few enough companies (what, like, 3?) that own the majority of the brands so they don't even need to collude to figure out that they can all hover around "as high as we can get away with" together.
I've been nursing a minor Coke Zero addiction for years but usually get the store brand which is close enough at half the cost. For whatever reason Coke Zero itself dropped in price by about 30% recently but that's apparently not nationwide.
It really kind of blows my mind how much of that people drink. I'll get a 2 liter bottle that will last days and then I read about people going through entire cases of Mountain Dew Insane Flavor Combo Super Bacinator Blast in a day and it's like my god that's like 4000 kcals of corn syrup.
It's sad to see, when I go to my local Walmart, how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases. It must be a significant source of liquid for them.
More importantly it is a significant source of calories. My brother quit soda years ago when he realized he was getting 1/3 of his daily calories from sugar - a little sugar is okay but you can't meet your daily nutrient needs when that much is from sugar. If it is just liquid soda is just as others (and probably better than alcohol), but there are other considerations.
> how much sugar water people buy, cases and cases
One confounding factor here is that oftentimes the price is only reasonable in bulk. I don't know about walmart, but around me the best deal typically is "buy 2 get 3 free". I rarely buy/drink soda, but on the occasions I buy at all I'll be getting many cases at a time.
I find that the Walmart brand diet sodas are pretty good and are only $1 for a 2 liter.
Late stage capitalism
It's totally "because they can". Even if you take marketing budgets into account I can't imagine it costs that much more to make a 2l of Diet Coke vs the store brands which still sell for $1 where I live
That stuff is so bad for you though that raising the price probably decreases the country's total healthcare costs by quite a bit.
I buy soda syrup to make soda, but even that's gotten expensive. Funny thing is that I do it to reduce how much I was putting in recycling, but even with the extra state tax for bottles/cans, it actually costs me slightly more to make it myself.
I've had great results making my own mineral water clones though, so maybe I'll try making LabCoatz's coca cola clone syrup and see how it works with sucrolose or allulose.
It was intentional price gouging, but prices have become to come down after shareholders pressured CEOs to lower the prices in response to tepid sales numbers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pepsico-cut-prices-eliminate-...
(The link is for PepsiCo but we all know that they all raised their prices together and will lower their prices together.)
>I can't think of a good explanation for this.
Supply and demand.
I prefer "greed". It's the much a simpler explanation that works just as well. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that the demand for soda has stayed the same or even actually declined while the supply of corn and water hasn't bottomed out or gotten proportionately more expensive for soda companies.
You just restated the supply and demand curve with different terms.
The thing with inflation is that a product's individual components may cost the same or less over time, but the cost of everything else...like housing...doubles every couple of years. So you need to increase prices to support higher salaries, increasing minimum wage, etc. It's rides the line of becoming run away inflation since everyone needs to raise prices to support COL, then everything gets more expensive, then they need to raise prices again to support everything else getting more expensive. It's a loop that will never be closed
If you're buying individual bottles, you're paying for the refrigerator. Otherwise you buy boxes and it's still very cheap. Spindrift is $6.49 for an eight-pack and LaCroix is cheaper. I haven't bought Coke in a long time, sorry.
Pepsi, coke ,Dr p, A&W root beer are now all .50c per can or more, in bulk cases from Sam's. Root beer is like 75c/can.
5 years ago I think they were about 30c.
Beer has done the same thing. A few years ago I could get any of a number of beers at Costco for $1 per can/bottle in a 24 pack. Now the cheapest name brand offerings are $1.33 per can and even the Kirkland brand is over $1. If I buy it at a standard grocery store, those same beers are over $2 each.
FWIW, a frugal person can't simply think to eat whatever has declined in price... It's worth realizing that, for example, a 20% rise on the 0.33 ramen is still one of your cheapest options.
From my perspective (ie, in the USA) it can still be hella cheap if you're willing to cook food yourself from scratch. Rice, Beans, Lentils, and frozen veggies can give you the baseline of very nutritious meals (but boring af) for like $2 a day.
you can eat (all dry/unprepared weight) 100g white rice, 100g black beans, 100g black lentils, 225g frozen mixed veggies for about $1 if you buy in small bulk (like 2-5lbs at a time)
If you add a few cents of spices a day, I would argue it's not even too boring af and can even arguably be fairly tasty!
We're really sorely missing something like "semver for food".
I don't have deep food industry knowledge, IIRC there are some rules around SKUs needing to rotate in response to certain changes, but these are completely opaque to customers. People should know they're eating snickers 12.2.2, and while a sub-1% change to one ingredient's amount might be a patch bump, a 10% total weight reduction should absolutely trigger a major version bump. SKU and nutrition labels should be tied to a public changelog, and inaccuracies in that changelog should proportionally imperil manufacturer solvency.
I love this quote from Walmart describing loss leaders turned inside out.
Imagine, Alice: "I think we can sell this plastic gizmo for 1000% markup" Bob: "Wonderful, we can use those profits to lower prices on things people need!"> swai fish fillets from Vietnam (up 34%)
Swai is perhaps the worst possible fish to buy (low nutritional value, bad for environment, contains toxins) so (a) it's unfortunate they picked this fish and (b) it's good it's more expensive since perhaps people will buy less of it.
I also wouldn't trust it. Zero real oversight on food quality in VN.
This was really informative!
A recent job loss forced me to look harder at my own financials, and I was surprised just how much things like groceries accounts for in overall spending. I'm making a habit this year of, at the end of each day, recording what I spent and on what - so I can get better data.
I appreciate what NPR did here. Taking into account price per ounce/square foot/etc is essential so I'm glad they did.
It's useful to see these kinds of changes, can help make decisions. If company X is shrinking product Y, maybe it's time to look for an off-brand instead? That's what I'll be doing for a lot of things.
It would be interesting to see inflation indexes based on different typical buyers, to include the ultra rich. Basically, inflation isn't uniform and impacts people differently. Of course that brings up how you actually measure the impact of inflation to the ultra rich when the price of corn flakes is meaningless and their personal purchase are negligible. Maybe you look at how much the cost to buy a politician has gone up?
Cue outrage from the conservative administration for checks notes quality journalism.
I'm surprised the US doesn't try doing chocolate growing in some of it's big empty, hot states.
In general, if there's enough water to grow chocolate, then a relatively hot, empty state chooses to build single-family housing developments and five-lane roads.
The really empty states lack the water.
> As affordability became Americans' top concern, big brands began to worry about shoppers switching to store-label competitors or skipping some purchases altogether.
I think, at least in the last year-or-so, big brands also became worried about getting flamed by the president for raising prices.
The companies that got flamed by 1600 Penn were the ones that raised prices without paying the occupant of 1600 Penn a bribe beforehand.
For the other 96% of the world population: 1600 Penn is a cute slang term referring to the address of the White House, a.k.a the president.
would be interesting to reveal the holding company behind each brand and what impact they had on products
What a poorly-built site. There is a cookie banner covering a popover solicitation for donations, covering an inset photo/caption which itself is covered by a cookie banner (wtf?) ... closed the tab.
For the love of god- I can't understand why people buy paper towels. It makes zero sense. It's expensive, you throw it after a use. I started using cloth towels and life is so much better.
I don't use them frequently, but I love them for some things. In particular, my wife likes our cloths to look nice. This means wiping up something staining will make the cloths look worse. In those cases I pull out a paper towel. I could get black cloths to get around this, but she doesn't like those. So, here we are.
They're also useful when I need to use a harsh chemical that I don't want lingering on a household cloth my young kids might use on their bodies.
I've had the same roll for around a year, but it's almost exhausted. I think they're fine.
They're also very useful in a lab setting, but that's another matter.
Same here.
We stopped using toilet paper during covid, got a bidet, and bought a couple hundred shop towels to dry our butts. Now we only buy toilet paper for guests, which happens maybe once a year after throwing several parties.
Then we also bought shop towels for the kitchen to replace paper towels. I love the shop towels so much.
The butt-towels are white, and we wash them with bleach, there's been zero problems doing this over the last ~6 years. If there happens to be a bit of excess poop on a towel (typically there is none at all), we just throw it out, we have hundreds. The kitchen towels are blue, so we don't mix them up with the butt-towels.
We have laundry baskets for each kind of shop towel. A small one in the bathrooms, a larger one in the kitchen for the kitchen towels. We have to wash the butt-towels maybe once a month, and about the same for the kitchen towels. It's a simple chore that takes practically none of our time, less than it would to go out and buy paper. No, the butt-towels do not smell at all, they dry quickly and there's never been any problem whatsoever.
It's so much better than spending multiple $100s of dollars a year on paper that literally gets flushed down the toilet or goes into the trash.
A few of our friends took notice and started doing this too.
Honestly, I don't know why we ever wiped our butts with toilet paper for so many years, it's just so... shitty. It's just not a good experience. When we travel we miss our bidet and shop towels so much, to the point that I've ordered a cheap bidet if I'm staying in an Airbnb for a week or more, and install it there, and leave it behind. $30 well spent.
Take my upvote and leave this platform forever
Ladies and gentlemen......the internet.
Wages and energy have not increased. Tariffs on food are basically non existent for most items.
It's 100% purely supply side pricing, propped up by government spending and credit (which is largely backstopped by the government as well).
I listened to a podcast recently that some 'homeowners' have not made a mortgage payment in years, have no ability to pay, but here are essentially unlimited 'no doc' mortgage modifications available since the Corona time period.
> listened to a podcast recently that some 'homeowners' have not made a mortgage payment in years, have no ability to pay,
How? Somebody is holding the bag here on the mortgage - a bank, probably. And they are fine with not receiving payments? Or is somebody else making payments on the homeowner's behalf?
So, the basic process is 1) Borrow stops making payments. 2) Borrow goes into forbearance for 12 months just prior to foreclosure start. 3) Forbearance ends, borrower cannot make current. 4) FHA steps in to do loan modification. Essentially, they roll the forebeared balance into the loan, payoff the existing mortgage, and issue a new FHA-backed loan, without any income or payment ability qualifications. 5) Repeat the process again.
So, the government is making everyone whole.
Mortgage foreclosure is a legal process that takes a very long time and is very expensive.
It doesn't take years, and it's less expensive than writing off the mortgage.
In judicial foreclosure states, the process can take 12 to 24 months, and longer if contested or if other periods apply. In nonjudicial states, timelines are shorter but still typically 4 to 9 months from default to sale.
Lenders incur legal fees, court costs, property taxes, insurance, maintenance, HOA dues, servicing advances, and loss of interest during the process. Industry estimates often put foreclosure costs in the tens of thousands of dollars per loan, excluding the loss from selling the property below the outstanding balance.
“Writing off the mortgage” is not the realistic alternative. Lenders generally compare foreclosure against loan modification, repayment plans, short sales, or deeds-in-lieu, because charge-offs are accounting outcomes after losses are realized, not an operational substitute for foreclosure.
Banks are perfectly well equipped to foreclose on you. Ask anybody who was around in 2008.
You don't usually skate by on years of non-payments, so I'd sticker the original claim with [citation needed]
Don't know if this is what the OP is referring to, but: https://archive.is/2EObp
sounds like a very similar thing.
Here's another one on perpetual forbearances: https://www.wsj.com/opinion/covid-housing-relief-forever-rec...
This would seem to indicate that Covid forbearances are extending into 2026: https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/SFH/documents/SFH_FHA_INFO_...
Yeah, those are some of the programs I was referring to. The 'loophole' aspect that was mentioned on the podcast is that when the FHA does the 'loss mitigation' (aka, refi's the loan), there is not any kind of qualification as to whether the buyer will ever be able to make a payment on the new loan. It's just approved anyway, and the cycle can happen unlimited times.
I think they're looking at adding a means test, but I'm unsure.
It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people thought the president would make any really impact on inflation. That said, with global conditions improving it looks like we could've actually seen a drastically larger reduction in inflation if not for the tariffs. The goals of the tariffs seem so misaligned with what the country needs - again not surprising that we're doing something the opposite of what we need - and again also not surprising that his supporters don't seem to care.
I think the real issue is that for the powers that be, inflation is seen as either neutral or a good thing. The only people it hurts is the working class and the blame is nebulous. So it is used as a tool to increase taxes without changing laws, lower the cost of debt, and cut labor wages since they don't get pay raises commensurate with inflation. So I think it is a trick played upon the working class to screw them over in the long term while the wealthy are protected because all their assets simply go up in value with inflation. I think the target inflation rate should be 0%, not 2%. I simply don't believe the justification for the 2% target.
We're well above 2% anyway, I doubt they will ever hit that again - they are already having to cut rates because job market is frozen, and that will increase inflation pressure.
I track my spend each year and my personal actual inflation rate has averaged about 4.5% over past 5 years. And I'm pretty low income, my spending is all core stuff.
A weak economy bodes well for cash infused investors as fire sale prices arise.
I think we’ve crossed a line where we can no longer assume basic alignment with “our” leadership.
>It's disappointing, but not surprising, that people thought the president would make any really impact on inflation
Except that a president, in normal times, COULD make an impact on inflation, both directly and indirectly.
What is surprising, is that after a completely failed presidency that saw a marked decrease in middle class prosperity, people thought that Donald Trump, of all people, could bring inflation down.
man, i already can't wait for November to be over.
The article text cites a comment about ice cream becoming unaffordable.
The numbers show reduced prices for milk and butter (e.g. cream), and sugar remaining constant.
Thus: ice cream is being priced too high.
If you try it at home you'll realise combining milk, butter and sugar in a bowl doesn't create ice cream. And when you figure out how to create ice cream you'll realise moving said ice cream to a place where you can sell it requires extra steps too
You also have to learn how to do it without adding things like listeria which seems like a difficult task for at least one brand after multiple rounds of recalls.
How does the cost of chilling, packaging, and moving 1/2 Gallon of ice cream differ from 1/2 Gallon of frozen dairy dessert?
There’s more profit in frozen dairy dessert and at least some customers can’t tell the difference or prefer it. For the rest of us, we wait for a sale or ice cream becomes a special treat.
Labor costs have risen. There are other inputs than a handful of raw materials.
Even if ice cream is lower, if the price of staples is going up you have to make cuts elsewhere.
Maybe the milk and butter were local while the ice cream was imported and hit with tariffs?
Less than .2% of ice cream is imported.
Ice cream is being priced too high if the ice cream sellers would make more money by decreasing the price of ice cream. If they wouldn't, it is appropriately priced.
Or, from the buyer's perspective, it is priced appropriately if the total amount buyers would spend on it would go down if the price is lowered or raised.
There isn't a correct intrinsic price that an object should be sold at that can be calculated based on the ingredients and labor. That idea is one of the fundamental flaws of Marxism. Price is a compromise between the buyers and sellers, based on the values of each.
This story is a fiction pitting the seller and buyer against each other in a context free vacuum. The reality is that between buyer and seller there are channels which are either under control of the seller or another powerfull third party. The playing field is very difficult to enter for new sellers and the number of sellers has been going down for a long time tilting the playing field more and more against the buyer.
Is it completely insane and incoherent to imagine a situation where ice cream has two equilibrium prices, one higher and one lower, and the market just settles on the higher one? Like, imagine a case where Jeni's would start losing money on every pint if they reduced the price by a dollar, but they'd make the same amount of money overall if they reduced it by 3. But they're in a local optimum, the "price reduced by 3" is identical for revenue purposes, and they choose their current local optimum. Then ice cream could still be priced too high and be "appropriately priced". Is this impossible?
> Is it completely insane and incoherent to imagine a situation where ice cream has two equilibrium prices, one higher and one lower, and the market just settles on the higher one?
It it completely insane? No. But draw a set of supply and demand curves that supports it, and then try to come up with a narrative that explains them. In the static, same time, all other things being equal case, it is hard to do.
Does ice cream need to be affordable to 100% of US households, regardless of their other budgeting decisions?
That's the implication of your comment.
I've reduced my ice cream intake close to 0 solely based on price. Specifically, I remember the prices from long ago to the current just under $10. To me, ice cream should not be the same price of a cheap bottle of wine or other alcohol as an example comparison. We all have our own individual red lines, but ice cream prices crossed mine some time ago
The implication is economic decline.
Healthy economies "should" have a reward for specialization where both supplier and purchaser win. There is no reward anymore for economic specialization in the context of ice cream; its cheaper to make your own, now. This is a troubling long term implication for any *-as-a-service
There's a second even worse economic implication in that ice cream has long been affordable to 100% of US households... Now due to permanent long term economic decline its seen as acceptable losses for some not to afford it anymore. Again, troubling long term implications.
1. Ice cream has never been affordable to 100% of US households.
2. I strongly suspect the couple in the article could afford ice cream if they brought less beef, less name brand items, or were just more savvy shoppers.
3. I don't know how you determined that it's cheaper to make your own ice cream, but I would say that's generally inaccurate based on personal experience and a basic assessment of input costs and a reasonable value on your time.
4. If you really feel like ice cream is overpriced, you have identified an opportunity!
First, I think you're probably right that ice cream is priced too high compared to its inputs.
But maybe there are other factors? What about energy? One would assume that ice cream has a higher energy requirement than other "treat" style products? Are there specific tariff impacts on ice cream manufacturing equipment?
it may be that the costs of labor, distribution, and manufacture (for various reasons) have been increased
Could be. But also, ice cream manufacturers buy their ingredients more cheaply than consumers do. It is very possible that the cost of milk/butter/sugar at Walmart reflect Walmart deciding to lower their profit margins on these items, even if the cost to Walmart has increased.
Or - Walmart is a big enough supplier that they have stable contracts with manufacturers, and are able to purchase their ingredients for the same cost as always, while Turkey Hill et al is competing over what's left. (Like Apple, buying up TSMC runs.)