Inflation. Everyone's discussing it these days, at least on X.

Is it bad? Is it fine? Are our perceptions skewed by virtue of living in 2026 which makes accurate evaluation of prices in 1996 impossible?

Going to McDonald’s was an occasion back then. There weren’t 35 different kinds of IPAs in the grocery store. Arugula didn’t exist until sometime around 2009.

It’s hard to know. Different people have different ideas on all of this and it’s hard to say one is more right than another. Sometimes there are multiple right answers.

Socialism starter

Matt Walsh wrote:

Grocery prices are insane. They’re still rising. Addressing this problem should be the number one priority of every elected leader. End the stupid foreign wars and focus on this issue. It’s one of the main reasons socialists are gaining power.

He’s not wrong. Grocery prices are higher than I ever remember. Most families I know are acutely aware of the situation. When you're feeding growing kids, you can’t skimp the way you skimped when you were 21. You can’t feed them junk because it’s cheaper; you have to feed them nutritiously, and so you end up feeling those higher prices pretty sharply.

Burrito-nomics

Jeremy Kauffman wrote:

“So far as I can tell, it's simply not true that food has gotten more expensive in real dollars in the United States. Why are people so convinced this is true? What's the evidence?”

Below his post he shared a graph detailing the fact that grocery prices have only risen in nominal terms, not real terms, essentially saying prices are higher but so are wages.

In response to claims of $20 burritos being prohibitively expensive for young people, Kauffman detailed the hard numbers for feeding burritos to a family of eight with ingredients from Wal-Mart. The total price was $18.38

Kauffman isn’t wrong either. Although my wife handles the food in our house, I do know we buy our groceries from Meijer, Aldi, and Walmart. I know there are absolutely affordable prices to be found if you don’t buy your ingredients at Whole Foods and you make your food at home rather than going out. A gallon of milk from our local Walmart is $3.17; a gallon of milk from the nearby Whole Foods is $6.69.

To his point about prices rising nominally but not in real terms, I’m not an economist or a statistician, so I don’t know all the ins and outs of how these numbers are calculated, but I do know we tend to really notice in passionate and negative terms when the prices swell at the store but we don’t really notice or account for our paycheck swelling in our bank account. It’s a sad fact that we tend to focus on the bad more than the good.

Passion for premium

Lomez wrote:

Short answer is that post-boomers became accustomed to premium/boutique brands. These things do, in fact, cost a lot more than generics. No seed oils. All organic. Cage free. Etc. Etc. My family spends a lot more on groceries in *real* dollars than my parents did because, like just about everyone posting online about this, we over-extend and buy the$20 dollar bottle of nice Vermont maple syrup and $8 fancy French butter and do this across the board for almost every category [choose your own indulgence/health fixation]. I know we're not alone in this. I've seen your pantries.

The longer answer is that other categories of spending have gone significantly up — housing, childcare, insurance — and so there's less slack in the average person's budget. Grocery prices might be flat as a general matter, but the belt can still feel — and actually be — a lot tighter.

He is certainly correct, and like most other very correct answers to complex questions, the people don’t want to hear it.

In the 1990s, before the foodie revolution, our parents fed us very plain food. We rarely went out to eat, and it was a big event when we did. There were no cans of sparkling water. We never had pop in the fridge. We didn’t even really stop at fast food when traveling; we packed sandwiches in a cooler full of half-melted ice bags at the bottom.

Going to McDonald’s was an occasion back then. There weren’t 35 different kinds of IPAs in the grocery store. Arugula didn’t exist until sometime around 2009. The children of 2026 have no experience with the iceberg lettuce salad of 1996 — you know the one, with bland white crispy lettuce, large tomatoes that aren’t even close to ripe, and three fat cucumber slices.

Our kids eat guacamole, sushi, organic eggs, copious amounts of raspberries with Greek yogurt in the morning, and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t even encounter until I was in my 20s.

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Fancy feasts

It’s a fascinating story about class and taste. How even though our society is, in many ways, more classless and lowbrow than ever, many people are eating food that really only very wealthy and very health-conscious individuals ate back in 1996, and that fact plays some role in how we perceive prices.

The thing about shifting expectations after the foodie revolution is that it doesn’t feel like any of those things that were fancy and expensive in 1996 are elite in 2026. Fresh guacamole is now the Kraft American cheese single, and now no one would eat the Kraft American cheese single, and this skews our perception.

Of course, it goes without saying that someone does eat the Kraft American cheese single. Millions of people do, just like we did. Actually, in fact, we didn’t eat the Kraft American single at the Root house in 1996 because they were considered kind of fancy and more expensive than buying a block of cheese and cutting it yourself.

Reality bites

The truth about inflation is that whether it’s real bad, pretty normal, or the end of the world as we know it, we can’t do anything about it. You, dear reader, have no way to meaningfully change the global financial system or the American economic situation at this time. These things are too big for an individual citizen to have any control over. You can’t make the prices lower, you can’t stop the bleeding, you can’t do anything other than buy what you need to buy while doing your best to stay within your budget.

We humans have a terrible tendency to focus very heavily on things we can’t really change. I don’t know why it is, but it is. Is it because we are naturally malcontent? Or is it because we are whiners with no strength? Or maybe we are masochists? Obsessing endlessly about something you view as terrible and painful when you have no way to change it seems like a form of masochism, doesn’t it?

Whatever it is, it isn’t good. We can’t focus all our energy or emotional firepower on being angry about inflation. Maybe we should be angry; maybe we shouldn’t be angry. I don’t know. But I do know that all we can do is acknowledge the reality of the world as it is, whether it be good or bad, and do our best to adapt to the current situation, live the best life we can in the meantime, and hope for the best.

That’s how it was in 1996 and how it is in 2026.