Inflation up or down

georged123

Swipe said:

£12 a pack? I see Malboro Golds are £15 in the Tesco website 

£12 is your minimum nowadays for the cheaper fags. Marlboros, Silk Cut Purple etc are easily over £15 in a lot of places...

I work in retail and a lot of people just dont seem bothered about the price of things. There's no real change to routines or budgets for a lot of people. 

Another poster made the point about cheap money and I think thats a salient point. The government is happy to keep paying out a lot of money to keep the economy just about ticking along but something's going to give sooner rather than later.

Frequentlyhere

You're right, I had to temper myself as the first fags I looked at to check (on ASDA's website) were my mum's old brand - Silk Cut - £17/pack, can you imagine! Thankfully she's switched to vapes now. There was something particularly poisonous-smelling about silk cut.

ColdIron

Silk Cut Silver £16.50 in my local CostCutter, 'cheapest' around. The 'got a fag mate' people can buy their own now. Trickle down economics

pecunianonolet

We may want to get back on the topic or are we now conducting indexing of country wide fag pricing?

DoublePolaroid

To be fair the subject of the thread has been definitively answered so going OT seems rather harmless in this case.

pecunianonolet

DoublePolaroid said:

To be fair the subject of the thread has been definitively answered so going OT seems rather harmless in this case.

For this period, yes, it was answered. There will be next month, and the one after, and so on and we will have to evaluate again.

What annoys me the most at the moment is that reporting on the topic is full of clickbait with punchy headlines for the masses. However, 0.1 percentage point increase falls well into the marginal rate of error in statistics. 

dealyboy

There is an interesting analysis of these latest inflation figures by Sasha Yanshin on Youtube.

Channel @SashaYanshin 'They Keep Lying To You About UK Inflation' ...

CPIH really 6.4% vs. ONS 4.2%
- housing costs under represented
- energy costs under represented
- ongoing wage-price spiral

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pASpV1XlGA

zagfles

I watched it just for amusement. Usual conspiracy theorist bull. However inflation is measured, consistency is the key. The govt energy subsidy wasn't included, meaning inflation now looks lower than it would have been? So what, it wouldn't have been included last winter either which meant the inflation figures then were much higher than they would have been had it been included. Why is he not mentioning that? Surely the govt would have preferred the figures to be lower when they were very high?

Same for mortgage interest costs. Interest AFAIK has never been included in inflation measures. After all it's the usual tool the BoE use to reduce inflation, and have done for decades, they increase interest rates to reduce inflation. That is obviously never going to work if interest is included in inflation figures as every rise in interest rates would increase inflation not reduce it!! If they were to include interest paid then they would have to include interest earned by people with savings. After all interest is just a transfer from people with loans to people with savings. 

Ed-1

zagfles said:

The govt energy subsidy wasn't included, meaning inflation now looks lower than it would have been? 

Same for mortgage interest costs. Interest AFAIK has never been included in inflation measures.

The Energy Bills Support Scheme £400 off bills wasn't included but the biggest subsidy (the Energy Price Guarantee) was included.

Mortgage interest rates are included in RPI but not CPI.

Nebulous2

georged123 said:

Swipe said:

£12 a pack? I see Malboro Golds are £15 in the Tesco website 

£12 is your minimum nowadays for the cheaper fags. Marlboros, Silk Cut Purple etc are easily over £15 in a lot of places...

I work in retail and a lot of people just dont seem bothered about the price of things. There's no real change to routines or budgets for a lot of people. 

Another poster made the point about cheap money and I think thats a salient point. The government is happy to keep paying out a lot of money to keep the economy just about ticking along but something's going to give sooner rather than later.

I've been conducting my own anecdotal survey of retail spending, and I've been amazed at how long expenditure has persisted in the face of higher interest rates. We went for a meal a week ago - quite early, before 6, as we had been busy and were hungry. "I'm sorry, there isn't a table in the restaurant until 9, but you can eat in the bar area if you can find a table there." Restaurant prices around here, in a fishing area, have risen substantially since the pandemic. Pre-pandemic fish and chips was almost always under £10. Now its around £16 - in a fairly modest eatery - even at lunchtime. Yet they are still very busy, with their biggest issue being staffing. 

I've got my own campaign going against the caravan and motorhome club. We've caravanned a great deal for around 40 years, but I'm now reluctant to pay their prices. Site pricing has doubled since pre-pandemic. A smidge under £20 a night then and a sliver under £40 a night now. The forums are full of people complaining, bookings do seem to have been affected, but the club still isn't listening. 

There are indicators that the boom is running out of steam however. Credit card debt is rising. Retail sales were unexpectedly down in December. Hospitality venues are closing - which seems out of step with my observations of restaurants that are perpetually full - but there you are. Housebuilders are going bust. 

As more and more people come to the end of fixed mortgage deals the increases will have an impact on discretionary spending. 

It appears the medicine will work, just much more slowly than I expected. 

Sentiment is everything in a consumer-driven economy, and there is still a possibility that it tips quickly and aggressively, rather than the expected 'soft landing.'