It’s not anecdotal, search online for old copies of menus from popular chain restaurants.
Inflation has been retconned (i.e “Burgers were always $15, what are you talking about?”) They don’t want you to notice as your wealth is slowly stolen through the loss of purchasing power.
The gp used poor terminology. Inflation doesn't impact wealth nearly so much as income. The idle rich draw their income from capital gains on investments in the things that are becoming more expensive and are largely non negotiable. People must spend wages on shelter food energy and probably transport. They will pull back on things they enjoy but cannot afford now. The wealthy will continue to purchase what they want when they want. That is why selling high end luxury goods is a much more stable option than selling thebthings that are luxuries for those who get their income from wages.
> The idle rich draw their income from capital gains on investments in the things that are becoming more expensive and are largely non negotiable. People must spend wages on shelter food energy and probably transport.
Wages have gone up in real terms (how the fed measures inflation). Food, energy, & transport have slightly under-performed inflation.
i.e. there's no way to slice it - the average laborer can afford more food & labor now than in the past.
The linked site differs from Case Shiller - saying that housing has also under-performed inflation. I'm interested how they arrived at that.
Housing is the real problem - and the vast, vast majority of housing in the US is owned by individuals and mom-and-pop investors, not corporations & billionaires.
The idle rich cannot be blamed for our problems in housing - though they can be blamed for other things. On housing, we can only blame ourselves, voting aggressively to curtail development at every opportunity.
I'm suspicious of the food numbers too. The CPI substitues things like hamburgers for pot roast. The price of a healthy diet has increased, the price of a dose of Soylent green is less than the price of what a healthy diet used to be. And I think that is what they are reporting.
Energy is cheaper, but we need more of it with years of back to back escalating extremes for both heating and cooling. Moving somewhere that isn't an impact gets into the housing issue.
And then medical and education are out of control.
Edit: to clarify, I am not laying all this at the feet of the idle rich, nor do I think idleness or wealth are bad things. They are great things we should all strive for for ourselves and others. I lay it at the feet of all of us who have made bad decisions, but some are more responsible than others, and many of those that shaped the policies that lead to these issues are wealthy as a result.
You are living in such a society. People who bought BRKA shares 55 years ago and just sat on their asses have done immensely better than those who worked their asses off.
Wages have not stagnated. It's been a defining feature of our COVID inflation that inequality stats have gotten better.
Specifically in HCOL coastal cities, we've seen increases to minimum wage, adjustments to the "tipped minimum wage" laws that mean business needs to cover more of the wage, and finally.. labor shortages causing restaurants to pay over even those increased minimums.
It wasn't long ago NYC minimum wage was under $10/hr, with "tipped minimum" being $7/hr.
Now you have some restaurants paying $20/hr to get staff.
> Anecdotally, I can remember a burger at a restaurant was about $6 in 1999. Now average seems to be 15 to 20.
When you go to a restaurant, you're mostly buying labor.
It's not a good benchmark for food prices.