Don't worry, fuel hasn't gone up that much. No, this one is about food. For quite some time now, ever since I've been doing it, certainly more than a year, our weekly family-of-4 shopping bill at Waitrose has been £100, give or take about £20, depending on how much booze or other exceptional items are on the list. Given all the news about increasing commoditity prices, and food riots, and suchlike, I keep expecting it to head skywards, but it hasn't. Perhaps Waitrose already has such overheads that they have enough fat to cut.
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According to todays SUnday Herald, annual food price inflation is about 7%.
So I suggest you take the weekly food shop (leaving out obvious outliers such as Christmas preparations) and do statistics on it. It would be interesting to see if it matched the 7% figure.
[7% is too small to see easily -W]
Chris Dillow had a posting up about grain prices a week or so ago. Apparently grain prices have fallen by 40% or so in recent weeks.
[http://www.fwi.co.uk/gr/fwipricesandtrends.pdf supports that, though they are a lot higher than a year ago -W]
Maybe the wholesale price of goods domestically hasn't changed much? I'm assuming Waitrose is sourcing more locally.
I have noticed substantial increases in cafe prices ( > 20% ) in London at least.
I heard on the radio last week that current inflation, if calculated in the manner in place during the Reagan administration, would be around 11%.
The food prices are noticeably hirer in Berkeley CA over the past several months. Our food bill has gone up substantially. We do buy mostly organic whole foods, so we may be atypical, but many of our stables are 30-40% higher then they were 6 months ago.