Inflation: How Much Did You Spend? Food? Gas/petrol? Diesel?

[Casey Claar]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)

Posted by Casey Claar (here)

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
In my North Texas town, gas is about $3.00 to $3.30 per gallon.

You posted this only 4 months ago -and driving by the gas station this morning ( in Southern California ) I see gas prices here are now $6.89 a gallon. Wow wow.

I suspect this will not be the end of the rapidly rising price of gas.

According to perplexity.ai right now, regarding Denton, Texas, where I live:

The approximate current price for regular gasoline in Denton, Texas looks to be around $3.30 to $3.35 per gallon.

In case you haven't noticed, one could make a good case that Northern Texas and Southern California are not in the same nation <grin>.

This is true, yes, but 9 months ago gas here ( California ), at a Chevron station was comparable at $4.50 a gallon. The price of the recent escalation here, relative to there is NOTABLE.

[petra]

I paid $3.49 for a cold soda when a pack of six warm ones cost $3.69. I work at the supermarket and some of the prices I see are insane. $5.99 for celery? Like someone else said, the price of chocolate chips is nuts. I love looking at people's receipts to see the discounts they get, sometimes I even get excited about it, but inwardly I know it's just a BS number. The customer loyalty card is terrible too, you get points only for select items, and you can only spend the points in increments of a thousand.

A can of paint costs $50

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
A small Hershey bar - the kind they put on a rack by the cash register - was $2.99 at the grocery store yesterday!

ouch - that would have cost me a nickel (5 cents) when I was a kid

[shaberon]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
A small Hershey bar - the kind they put on a rack by the cash register - was $2.99 at the grocery store yesterday!

ouch - that would have cost me a nickel (5 cents) when I was a kid

Oh yes it's amazing when, instead of just comparing recent hikes, you personally remember what stuff used to be.

The closest thing I can remember to that is the year I started school, a drink of milk was a nickel.

I think both the milk and the Hershey bar are still the same thing, these don't take R & D and new version rollouts. If you had an improved, efficient system, theoretically they would become cheaper. Even if that was just in the relative sense of wages increasing faster than the price.

Now we are around the point where every single bite of food costs a dollar, and when you think of the limited number of these one earns per hour, it's like putting everyone on dietary restriction.

[Bill Ryan]

Ecuador's gasoline crept up to $3.31/gallon, but then fell a couple of weeks ago to $3.25. (The price is set by the government for every gas station in the county.) That's for 85 octane, which is mixed with 5% ethanol. My 40 year old jeep runs just fine on that.

But here's the interesting thing. After they reduced the price (which the gov't officially warned would likely only be for a short while), of course I filled up my tank straight away. And then I realized my engine power was suddenly definitely a little less, which I can test easily as the road to the high mountains here is a long steep uphill.

So it's a kind of 'shrinkflation' of the gasoline. To keep the price down, they simply reduced the octane to something like 84, which reduces power and economy but is still safe for engines at high altitudes.

[shaberon]

That one is a mixed bag.

Octane isn't a chemical; it's an approximation of how evenly (or completely) fuel combusts at a given temperature, as measured by specialized "test engines" that themselves used to cost about $100,000. The relevant temperature is determined by the spark plug. Therefor, the best octane for a vehicle is determined by the plugs you're running. Most vehicles blow some amount of unused fuel straight out the exhaust. If that exceeds the tiniest portion, you can smell it plainly.

Ethanol is a corn alcohol, used in the United States as an outlet for the corn subsidy.

It's one of those shady ideas to keep farms in business, and, potentially a factor in inflation, especially once you realize it eats through gaskets.

In theory, farm business rescue is something I would support rather than bank bailouts. However, it became a permanent, static, relatively mindless thing, such as, in this case not providing a food item, but having a career in growing non-edible corn so it goes in the gas tank.

Here, we recently seem to have stopped the 15% level; most pumps are telling me "up to 10%", so I suppose it fluctuates a little bit. You have to drive around if you want to find one of the few stations that offer "non-ethanol gas".

I'm always concerned when noticing any kind of "sudden change" in anything like this, but that's because for me, it has usually been a mechanical problem. You may just have a governmentally-designed weaker combustion, which is not necessarily in itself harmful, but I can tell you that most engine power derives from exhaust.

What I would suggest to anyone is, start the vehicle, leave it in park, mash the gas pedal to the floor and see what happens. If something happens, keep it mashed down until it doesn't. You may have the world's biggest black dragon under the hood. It's going to be far worse if you do a lot of easy driving that never pushes the engine into the higher rpm's. The "healthiest" way to drive is really on a big highway at a high rate of speed, not piddling around the neighborhood.

[Sue (Ayt)]

Posted by shaberon (here)

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
A small Hershey bar - the kind they put on a rack by the cash register - was $2.99 at the grocery store yesterday!

ouch - that would have cost me a nickel (5 cents) when I was a kid

Oh yes it's amazing when, instead of just comparing recent hikes, you personally remember what stuff used to be.

The closest thing I can remember to that is the year I started school, a drink of milk was a nickel.

I think both the milk and the Hershey bar are still the same thing, these don't take R & D and new version rollouts. If you had an improved, efficient system, theoretically they would become cheaper. Even if that was just in the relative sense of wages increasing faster than the price.

Now we are around the point where every single bite of food costs a dollar, and when you think of the limited number of these one earns per hour, it's like putting everyone on dietary restriction.

Yep - Reminds me of a restaurant menu from 1970 that I posted HERE.
(read it and weep)

[shaberon]

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
Yep - Reminds me of a restaurant menu from 1970 that I posted HERE.
(read it and weep)

Shining example.

You have handmade soups at 40 - 50, my keyboard doesn't have the symbol, cents.

Today we have pre-made bags for $7 a cup.

Minimum wage, then, was about $5.50, meaning for an hour's work, you could get like ten cups of soup. Today, you'd have to earn $70/hr. just to keep even.

Crab cakes for a $1? Forget it. You might be able to get a small one for about $7, but, it will mostly be meal with just a tiny few crab flakes in it, difficult to taste. Everything crab is astronomical, so is salmon, which is mostly farmed.

Granted, there is not a variety of fish on that thing; Delaware is like crab land. I can understand paying more for something that comes from a long way away. Fish won't go far without technology, i. e. vacuum or refrigeration.

At that time, we used to get shrimp from someone who caught them, with the coast being about 150 miles away. They would go down and bring them back in coolers full of ice. That was all there was to it. Sounds energy-consumptive, but, you could make money doing it. And so of course we have also found ways to dismantle individual efforts like that; "regulations" are usually ways that big businesses can jump through the hoops, and the small one simply cannot keep up.

You can still do it in Venezuela or Iran, but we'll kill you for it.

[Sue (Ayt)]

Posted by shaberon (here)

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
Yep - Reminds me of a restaurant menu from 1970 that I posted HERE.
(read it and weep)

Shining example.

You have handmade soups at 40 - 50, my keyboard doesn't have the symbol, cents.

Today we have pre-made bags for $7 a cup.

Minimum wage, then, was about $5.50, meaning for an hour's work, you could get like ten cups of soup. Today, you'd have to earn $70/hr. just to keep even.

Crab cakes for a $1? Forget it. You might be able to get a small one for about $7, but, it will mostly be meal with just a tiny few crab flakes in it, difficult to taste. Everything crab is astronomical, so is salmon, which is mostly farmed.

Granted, there is not a variety of fish on that thing; Delaware is like crab land. I can understand paying more for something that comes from a long way away. Fish won't go far without technology, i. e. vacuum or refrigeration.

At that time, we used to get shrimp from someone who caught them, with the coast being about 150 miles away. They would go down and bring them back in coolers full of ice. That was all there was to it. Sounds energy-consumptive, but, you could make money doing it. And so of course we have also found ways to dismantle individual efforts like that; "regulations" are usually ways that big businesses can jump through the hoops, and the small one simply cannot keep up.

You can still do it in Venezuela or Iran, but we'll kill you for it.

I thought you may be a bit off on that 1970 minimum wage quote, Shaberon, as I remember making a lot less than that back then. I know every state has a different minimum set, but but google ai tells us that:

"The minimum wage in Delaware in 1970 was $1.25 per hour, as recorded in historical state data."

I also remember that my first, post college and quite respectable full-time job in 1974 paid me a salary of $100 a week for a 40 hour week. My husband at that time made a whopping $140 a week!

Even today, many states have $7.25 set as the minimum wage.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by shaberon (here)
The closest thing I can remember to that is the year I started school, a drink of milk was a nickel.

When I started school, we didn't pay for milk. It came from a cow in the barn.

(though we could sell it, at about a nickel a pint, if I remember, so that's similar to your memory.)

[shaberon]

Posted by Sue (Ayt) (here)
I thought you may be a bit off on that 1970 minimum wage quote, Shaberon, as I remember making a lot less than that back then. I know every state has a different minimum set, but but google ai tells us that:

"The minimum wage in Delaware in 1970 was $1.25 per hour, as recorded in historical state data."

Thank you.

I did that on purpose because I knew you would remember and I just spouted something from personal memory of a later time. But not that much later in the grand scheme of things. The nickel milk was 1976, and, I think I started earning money for chores in '79, and, as you can probably guess the thing at the time:


quarter video games!


I got tired of that so quickly.

My living memory on anything to do with money does not really begin until about ten years after that menu.

But we still had that same typed, blotchy, xeroxed-looking stuff everywhere, which I aesthetically prefer to what an inkjet will do. I like typewriters, cursive script, and pencils.

I remember going grocery shopping with my mom all the time in the late 70s, because the stores were a really long way away, and one time she made the strange mistake of telling me to throw whatever I wanted in the cart, and when we came out she told me:


That's the first time I've ever spent over a hundred dollars on groceries.


We can get you to do that with a few items now.

[shaberon]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
When I started school, we didn't pay for milk. It came from a cow in the barn.

(though we could sell it, at about a nickel a pint, if I remember, so that's similar to your memory.)

Meaning a cow barn was there at the school?

The second school I went to was actually stolen, they put it on a sledge and hauled it with horses about eight or ten miles around 1910. The newest building at that place was from 1949, the cafeteria. But no cows.

Here it is, or at least it was, a central state dairy that produced milk for the schools and prisons. If you could prove you were poor enough, you'd get milk and lunch for free. That, unfortunately, was a kind of dividing line, where people would make fun of you.

In my time, milk and lunch tracked something like 15, 25, 35, 50, 65 by the time I was in sixth grade, until I learned to steal the money and don't know what it cost after that.

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by shaberon (here)

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
When I started school, we didn't pay for milk. It came from a cow in the barn.

(though we could sell it, at about a nickel a pint, if I remember, so that's similar to your memory.)

Meaning a cow barn was there at the school?

Ah - no - I didn't drink the milk at school very much - that milk was an early version of the usual industrially processed crap sold in stores.

I drank the milk from the cows in my father's barn. Milk straight from the cow, before it has even been iced down, is a delicacy. Raw milk after it's been refrigerated is second best, and vat pasteurized (low and slow heat w/o pressure, not homogenized) milk is third best.

[shaberon]

Posted by ThePythonicCow (here)
I drank the milk from the cows in my father's barn. Milk straight from the cow, before it has even been iced down, is a delicacy. Raw milk after it's been refrigerated is second best, and vat pasteurized (low and slow heat w/o pressure, not homogenized) milk is third best.

But that flies in the face of everything must be pasteurized before you touch it.

I obviously was not raised on a farm, because by then it was across the country. It was potentially available to me, and I didn't pursue it, because I didn't like where it was (same reason my grandfather left and why it belonged to an uncle). In comparison to today, the furniture was stuffed with cash. That's what most of them did, because they hated banks. That's the main story I got about the late nineteenth century going forward.

I was there after his wife died and it was just one man with seasonal help somehow managed a cattle herd. He kept doing it until he was 96 and then I don't really know what happened to it. So I denied myself the relative economic freedom of continuing the cattle work, but not because that's what it was. Instead, I'm vested with the folk wisdom of 3/4 of my grandparents leaving the farms, and that's because I never met my other grandmother and don't know about her origin.

None of them were exactly complacent about decisions being made by non-farm workers.

It does give me an idea of steadily rising costs from over a hundred years and the visibility of the increasing dominance of a financial class despite opposition.

[Bill Ryan]

Not a personal "How much did you spend?", but some interesting statistics just published about real inflation.

Price increases since the start of the Iran war:

[shaberon]

Nice. I've always wanted to compare Palm Oil to Diammonium Phosphate. How about Sulfuric Acid?


One of the few things I pay retail for is a pack of sprouts, because, well, when they go out, the whole thing is ruined almost immediately. It's a thing with usually no nutrient label although it contains about ten times the mineral concentration of an adult plant. If I remember rightly they were $2.99 and now $3.49. That's the cheapest kind.

A vegetable succotash I used to like went from $6.99 to $8.99/lb.

I haven't actually bought anything, yet, except some gas which I think was the most I've ever paid. At 36% the chart seems spot on. I like percentages because it largely ignores regional variations.

When we see how rice tracked just like gas, that's not considered "good news".