Starting April of 2022, people spent more on food service than grocery stores.
Food and Beverage Stores vs Food Service
- Food and Beverage Stores: 85,526
- Food Service: 103,555
- Total: 189,081
Food and Beverage Stores vs Food Service Percentage
- Food and Beverage Stores: 45.23 percent
- Food Service: 54.77 percent
Where the BLS Says You Spend Your Money
- Food total: 13.522 percent
- Food at Home: 8.231 percent
- Food Away from Home: 5.290 percent
Corrected BLS Weights
- Food total: 13.522 percent
- Food at Home: 6.116 percent
- Food Away from Home: 7.406 percent
AI Synopsis
Retail data updates every month, providing a highly accurate snapshot of current spending habits. In contrast, the BLS relies on the Consumer Expenditure Surveys (CE) to build its CPI weights. This process calculates weights based on multi-year trailing averages. While consumers have rapidly accelerated their spending on convenience and experiential dining since 2022, the rigid CPI basket updates much slower, leaving it structurally behind real-time shifts.
CPI Year-Over-Year Percent Change Food
CPI Year-Over-Year Percent Change Food Percent Change
- Food at Home: 2.7 percent
- Food and Beverage: 2.9 percent
- Food Away from Home: 3.4 percent
Since April 2022, the BLS has been underreporting food inflation.
In addition, the BLS totally ignores home prices, property taxes, and homeowners insurance.
It treats all three as capital expenses, not consumer expenses as if capital expenses don’t matter.
Inflation Matters
Dear Fed and BLS, inflation matters not just your BS measures of “consumer inflation”.
People see their property taxes and homeowner’s insurance soar and they know they are paying more for food and medical expenses than the BLS say.
Kevin Warsh wants more timely market measures. OK fine, but what we really need is a total overhaul of these calculations, not more timely nonsense.
Homeowner’s insurance is a very big deal, and totally ignored. Yet, stupid economists tell people real wages are rising.
They aren’t in any practical sense and it shows in every poll.
Is Homeowners Insurance Understated in the CPI?
For further discussion, please see Is Homeowners Insurance Understated in the CPI? Shop Around!
Our Insurance went up by $2,000. Then another $2,000. Here’s our story.
What’s the Insurance Weight?
The BLS says shelter is 35.473 of the CPI. Of that, Tenants’ and household insurance is allegedly 0.414 percent.
Sound right?
If you own a home, what percent of your income is spent on your homeowners’ insurance?
Under 1/2 of 1 percent?
It’s time to put a complete end to this nonsense. We need to scrap the CPI and start all over with where consumers really spend their money.
Typically at home 80/20, and go out on days with specials.
Who the hell can afford to dine out anymore? Well, at least somewhat regularly. Only the Epstein class and government employees.
Mostly at the petrol filling station.
You’re right. The CPI and other government numbers are rigged. How do you live in an America where everything’s a lie?
MIsh, your revised CPI percentage calculations are off.
There is a huge amount of food dollars bought for home consumption from Amazon.com and other online delivery places that are part of e-commerce sales and not from food and beverage stores.
The CPI isn’t structured to accurately represent inflation. It is built to make inflation look as low as possible, so people don’t yell at politicians and so the government can minimize debt service costs on the debt.
The CPI has been a bullshit number for a long time.
I am poor I have little to no money left over after the essentials
I think the best food in America is found at McDonalds. Like, it’s a huge corporation and they hire scientists. They do farm to table the safe way: professionally trained food inspectors. Their meats and vegetables are of the highest quality. My only complaint is recent dental work has left me unable to bite a McDonald’s pickle into smaller pieces. Weird. I keep forgetting to tell my dentist. Anyway, never trust a farmer (they owe the bank almost million dollars and you never know what shit they’ll use for fertilizers); trust a USDA inspector.
Sarcasm detector is failing me captain
hear hear. abort mission
Moron alert
Everyone trying to survive this economy ignores the CPI and other metrics, knowing they are BS
The people who care are the ones trying to make paper financial products look attractive, and they too know they are BS
So that leaves the one group: people holding paper financial products… how many know they are BS?
I go out to eat perhaps once per month. Far far cheaper to fix food at home mostly from scratch. Packaged preprocessed food greatly adds to the costs of eating at home. Housing and insurances are well over half of my monthly budget for my two households. My medical insurance was doubling every few years until I turned 65. Now my Medicare supplemental insurance just went up 10%.
Beyond the crazy inflation is the fact insurers are being poorly regulated. We need to re-enact laws to force them to maintain paying out 80% of what they take in for claims. In recent years it’s closer to 60%.
And I thought it was weird when somebody told me the proper method of preparing earthworms for dinner.
Maybe not so crazy after all.
The secret is to put them in a container of fresh cut grass so they can shit out all the dirt. Much tastier that way
Well some people are eating bullets but that’s just an average week in America. Kentucky, Virginia, Illinois.
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-16055781/five-people-shot-kentucky-lexington.html
Snails need a few days on cornmeal and a lot of garlic and butter when cooked.
I remember back in the 70’s when we had a massive round of inflation. Elderly on fixed incomes were eating pet food to stay alive.
All of the work on the border will be for nothing when the food inflation hits this fall and into next summer. Starving folks from the poorly run countries south of the border will be going thru, over, under or around any border impediments. The numbers of starving Africans will be enormous and they’ll be all heading across the Mediterranean. If the lunatic Chump escalates in the Middle East expect a huge flood of refugees heading north into Europe as well.
I have no clue who’s still eating out. The only national fast food place that’s not a total scam is Waffle House serving 2k calories for $13 (end bill $17 with tip). McDonald’s is sewer food and the other places are prohibitively expensive and know it. If you’re lucky enough to have cookout in your area you can also eat good there for under ten bucks, but that’s about it.
Sit down places are also a joke, $7 for fries you have to order a la carte isn’t even in the same universe as most Americans. Basically every restaurant save for meat and three is $15 a plate minimum, and I live in an area with cheap food.
Groceries aren’t much better at all, I shop at Aldi and things frequently vanish from the shelves for a while due to supply shocks. Either that or their prices explode upwards randomly and stay there. If I weren’t cooking for a family it would be more expensive to cook than to eat out most nights. America is in a protein emergency with chicken ticking upward because it’s all people can afford. A 3 pound chub of crappy hamburger is now $17 and I don’t hear a peep from MAHA about the literal shit sprayed all over our vegetables.
Given this, I’d love to hear how what’s left of MAGA can justify continuing to support an admin that tells them eating bread and water alone is a healthy diet.
It’s so damn expensive that it does not take a huge percentage to distort the numbers
I’m trying to support local eateries, but it’s difficult when our economy is this bad. Small businesses are being hammered and I think it’ll take significant trust busting to get them back. How can anyone compete when it costs a billion dollars just to open the doors on a place?
CPI is a joke. Why not use real numbers?
Who has real numbers?
I propose a rehaul
Mish,
What are your thoughts on John Williams’ numbers (Shadowstats)?
Yep, the old CPI. The CPI is designed to understate inflation while purporting to be official. Government understates inflation to control the COLA increases in pensions. There are over 70 million people getting social security.
In the US, I stopped eating out because the food quality turned to trash. Most restaurants use a big industrial company which I won’t name to deliver industrial food which tastes like crap: bland, generic, tasteless food.
Outside the US, the restaurant food is more organic and more affordable so I eat out more. Of course my CPI is now totally different than “suckers and losers” CPI so factor that in.
Please name it, on my next trip to the US I want to avoid bland generic tasteless food although there is a lot of it about.
It could be Sysco
Bingo! Almost every chain uses them. The best thing to do is look for a mom/pop restaurant shop, they’re not worth the big guys time.
I find the foods better too.
My wife and I may eat out twice per month. We can afford to eat out more often, but we just choose not to. We are retired and I am a better cook than my wife. I would estimate that dining out at a middle of the road restaurant with a drink each & tip costs us about $80. That’s our grocery bill for the week. We ditched buying beef unless on big sale.
Side note…we have some young guys down the block that are engineers employed by Lockheed, so I assume they make decent salaries. When walking by their house, I noticed a car pull up partway into their driveway. The driver gets out with a styrofoam cup, rings the doorbell, takes a photo, and leaves it on the front step. I asked the driver if would mind telling me what he just delivered? His response…”A cup of coffee”.
We’re doomed!
Oh man rjd, I live in downtown Austin which is the epicenter of the young professional/everything delivered lifestyle. We have 2 large shelving units in our building’s lobby for deliveries and you would be blown away by what you see sitting on them; a single bottle of 409 cleaner, a melted and watered down iced coffee, etc. I talked to one of the people who run our front desk and they said that a lot of residents actually have delivery drivers pick up and run their amazon returns to fedex for them!
Living inTexas, my taxes+insurance are more than my loan payment to the bank.
And they will keep going up until you go broke or sell to a smaller modest home. Rinse and repeat till you die.
Which taxes? I understand Texas has no state income tax? Insurance on home and vehicles? Thinking about “moving to Texas”, i.e. have Texas be my record of domicile.
Property taxes.
Average is about 1.3% of the value of your home, reassessed annually. So if your neighbor sells his house for a higher prices, your property taxes go up as well. Insurance will run you another $6,000 /yr in the Houston area.
Same in Florida. Mine are more than double my mortgage payment so effectively I have 3 mortgage payments.
Just keep in mind that those costs double roughly every ten years so do the math between when you think you’ll die and how much you’ll be paying over that time period. If you do it right, you won’t like what you discover.
Fully agree. But once the kids are out of the house in 5 years or so I won’t need a 4000+ sq foot house so we will sell and move.
Don’t count on the kids being out of the house…they may be back or never leave. Too hard to afford housing on an entry-level salary.
> Yet, stupid economists tell people real wages are rising.
I would like to see the breakdown between “stupid” and “mendacious”.
The system is carefully controlled by the prople behind the curtain. Everything else is staged.
When I first came to the US in 1996 I was surprised at the “Restaurant Culture” – no nation eat out so frequently, not even the French. I’d make an exception for Greek islanders out of tourist season, every night at a tavern, but that’s for socializing, not to actually eat (so more like a drink and a small side plate).
Assuming that one has the money to eat out frequently nowadays, they have to trust the chef. To be a professional chef, you have to have proper training. Proper storage, proper cooking, proper combos. Most cooks in the Chicago area food joints are amateurs, some of them dangerous. If you’re lucky they’ll serve you microwaved Stouffer’s.
At my age, my stomach and wallet can’t tolerate. I eat at home. I don’t want to worry about food quality and cost, and I don’t have to drive back afterwards.
Leaving aside financials, one thing that I learned from the cooking shows is that most famous cuisines (French, Italian, Chinese…) are a combo of high fat, high cheese, high sugar and resultant high cholesterol, which evolution prefers. All good when your best method of transportation is a donkey, but toxic when you don’t even do the basic necessities without motoring.
Low quality and bad storage of ingredients (frozen, thawed, re-frozen), cooked in low quality oils in very high temps, that’s your average mid-price diner nowadays. It’s not only here… go to the back of any French tourist restaurant, there’s a boatload of frozen meal packages.
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When I was in Greece in the 70s, public doctors and food companies were promoting sugar, margarine and seed oils. And last time I visited a Greek supermarket in 2004, I was shocked by the comparison with American supermarkets. The Americans had a lot healthier basic ingredients (at the time, cheaper too!) in their supermarkets, but they chose to buy frozen meals and eat out the rest of the time.
The best expenditure for your money per pound of weight gained is by eating out.
However, including resultant health care costs, not to mention loss of esthetics, it’s the worse expenditure possible.
Wait. Worse than heroin?
Where did I leave that number ….
My wife and I are probably pretty close to the BLS stat or even less food out because she has a passion for cooking and is VERY good at it. Usually one meal a week is takeout or out in a restaurant. It really helps our finances to eat the vast majority of meals at home. Plus the food at home is higher quality with good organics, a minimum of seed oils, etc. I think we’re the exception to the rule, however. Most people I know grab more food out. There are only a handful of restaurants we visit, usually food she doesn’t make…Indian cuisine, for example. Most restaurants are not really encouraging these days, high prices AND questionable quality is the standard, no doubt due to inflation and soaring labor costs. I don’t know where Warsh is getting the rising wages. I haven’t had one for several years. However, our unionized public employees are demanding and getting 6-8 percent a year plus COLA’s. Looks like the big difference in incomes is between private sector and public wages.
You nailed it, Bill! We’re retired and eat out maybe one meal a week. By cooking at home, we can choose quality ingredients and accommodate special dietary needs.
<<Looks like the big difference in incomes is between private sector and public wages>>
Same thing happened in Greece from 1981 and on (with the first socialist government). The difference was scandalous, since it was more than double. It was not the base salary, but the numerous “added benefits” in the public sector. Including even a “benefit for cleaning hands“, a “benefit for appearing on time“, a “benefit for firewood“, etc., which all public employees received. I’m not joking.
It became the dream of every Greek to get a degree, connections to a major political party, and get hired in the public sector to do nothing. Positions in the public sector are permanent per Greek law, you can’t fire them. And the pensions are not only for life, but are inherited too. All political parties now have agreed that this was the No. 1 factor in Greece’s economic collapse that followed.
Many folks ignore the C.P,I. unless it’s stops being the ( Consumer Perjured Index) which avoids much of the reality Consumers really face in their everyday spending. The amount of dollars we used for eating out has plummeted —as grocery and gasoline costs have surged and that has mostly replaced the previous budget used for restaurants. Many consumers are now forced to hunker down and the Donald will also start feeling that pain after the midterms.
I bet the dividing line is (singles + two working parents and kids at home) vs everyone else (stay at home moms, empty nesters, couples with no kids etc).
Working parents with kids are often way too exhausted to come home and then spend an hour or more preparing a meal and another 30 plus minutes cleaning up afterward. They are the ones getting lots of takeout (pizza, buckets of chicken etc). For singles it’s just not cost effective to prep and cook for 1 if you want to make anything beyond spaghetti in a can.
People with time to prepare a meal (the everyone else category) will do so whether it’s for cost reasons or just because they like their own cooking / preparation.
My experience exactly. Retired, married couple, empty nesters. We probably eat out one meal a week, and rarely consider the meal actually worth the price.
I can make a decent dinner in 20 mins. Less than 10 mins to clean up.
A lot easier to cook when all you eat is Deviled Eggs and Devil’s Food Cake
I rarely if ever eat away from home–too much for a soda or coffee plus tax plus tip. Groceries are not taxed–that is a 5.5-8.75% savings right there depending upon the state of the restaurants I would visit. 20% for tip. A non-water drink with the meal is 300-1000% markup. And by the time I’ve driven at $4 gas I could have cooked it at home and eaten it at my pace.
On the inflation comment–nearly every measure or methodology has been revisited, revised and tweaked as conditions have changed. I just read an article today about how SEER calculations have been revised to more strictly follow how HVAC performs and is used in the real world. Why? To apply more pressure to heat pumps and scour it for its impact to the climate change initiatives. That is to ignore what is going on in the inflation space is most likely narrative related–to underreport it gives political cover for looser money and lower rates. But in the real world we know it’s all hokem. They don’t need more data, they need to properly account for all of it. Property taxes, HOAs, homeowners insurance, health insurance, copays, deductibles, home prices, repeated circular hedonic substitutions, etc. No one believes 3.2% because it’s not real and it’s not even close.
What about takeout? Do you grab a pizza or a bucket of chicken or Chinese etc? Doing that saves on over priced drinks and need for tipping etc.
It also save you the hour or so of time to prep and cook the meal plus another 30 minutes or so afterwards cleaning up. That time savings is worth a lot.
Why? You have a lot to do?
I mostly eat rodents, some songbirds, but my secretary sometimes puts sashimi in my bowl.
I never pay for delivery.
Cats are disappearing like crazy in our neighborhood. Some attribute the losses to the influx of coyotes. I have my doubts!
That is very concerning!
Actually it’s a good thing. Outdoor cats are why native birds and animals are vanishing from the face of the earth. Not to mention how cruel it is to cats. I’ve seen a lot of poor ferals die badly from infections and there’s nothing you can do. People who don’t care to spay and neuter are a blight on charities.
Humans are more destructive to native birds and animals than all the cats ever to draw breath.
How about immigrants?
Cannabilism is illegal in America
They eat pets!
The .414% is only for contents & tenants policies. The contents portion of a homeowners policy is relatively small(although less than 1/2 of 1% is not believable). The structure & liability component of your homeowners insurance is buried in owners equivalent rent. I am however in agreement with your general assessment that the CPI deliberately understates what I call “street inflation”. Your food at home versus away from home ratios is further evidence of this.
I know what it incudes =. I am complaining that it does not include everything
I think this would be interesting to see on an income spread. I suspect the 1% don’t have a pan and the bottom 20% couldn’t tell you what time taco bell opens anymore.
I don’t think I’ve been to a restaurant in over 6 months. Don’t miss it. Mediocre food, mediocre service, 20% tip for walking across a floor without spitting in my food.
Tipping has broken most of it for me. I don’t feel comfortable paying so much on tips and I find it offensive that wait staff feel they must perform for their tips. They might as well be out front with an organ grinder dancing around with a little cup like a monkey.
US tipping culture is now insane. They’ve tried to introduce it here with resultant push back.
Personally, at home. Rurual and single. Might do a takeaway once or twice a month. It has also become insanely expensive compared to just a few years ago. Not that the supermarket is cheap either but…
At home.
I really don’t like dining out in the USA. Menu price + service charge + sales tax + tip drives me crazy. And don’t get me started on wine prices.
I do enjoy dining out in western Europe.The price is the cost and wine prices are reasonable.
Wine is the absolute worst bang for the buck alcoholic beverage wise. I’m getting the misses off drinking it when we are out because it’s 10 a glass for trash wine that is less than 10 a bottle. You still get beer and liquor for very reasonable prices (3 beer, 5 well) at many places especially during happy hour.
I gave up alcohol 15 years ago. Saved a lot of money since then! Don’t miss it at all.
The last time I was in Spain, wine and even an aperitif were free with the meal in a lot of places, and no tipping.
Darn those Socialist having a better time than us!
Don’t worry things will change when the migrants over running the Spanish enclaves in Morocco arrive.
Spain is already up to their eyeballs in African migrants. Has been for years.