For about two years, I’ve bought a firm-yet-perfectly-crumbly blueberry muffin almost every day from a cafe by my office. With a discount, I paid $1.55 for it.
Until this week.
The price went to $1.83 (with the discount). Twenty-eight more cents, you say. Big deal.
But it amounts to a 18.1% increase in the cost of a firm-yet-perfectly-crumbly blueberry muffin.
Do you recall the last time you got a 18.1% raise? Or your rent going up 18.1%? How about car insurance, a car, gasoline, clothing, subway tickets or more essential foodstuffs, like Pinkberry?
The government numbers seem nowhere as dramatic. But what will move you is this inflation calculator. My newly priced blueberry muffin would have cost $1.10 in 1991. In 1981, 74 cents. In 2050?