What Me. Monroe alleged could have been true. That poor folks’ food rose in price more sharply than non-poor folks’ food. So, the contention was tested. The answer is no:
The ONS examined the figures after Ms Monroe raised concerns that poorer families were disproportionately feeling the pinch from faster increases in prices of value items.
She said that the official measure of price rises “grossly underestimates the real cost of inflation as it happens to people with the least”.
ONS experimental data found that value range pasta, beef mince and bread jumped in price. The cost of value range potatoes, cheese, pizza and chips fell.
Budget brand pasta was up 50pc in the year to April and value crisps were up 17pc, a faster rate than their more expensive counterparts.
However, these increases were offset by budget products that rose in value more slowly than expensive versions, or fell in price compared to increases elsewhere.
Overall the inflation rate on low-cost items was broadly in line with the average product range, contrary to Ms Monroe’s complaints.
Food price inflation hit 6.7pc in April, compared to 6pc for the 30 budget items tracked by the ONS.
Well, good to have that sorted then. Except of course the claim is that it’s not sorted:
Nonetheless, Ms Monroe claimed victory on Twitter, saying the figures proved it is “far more expensive to be poor”.
She told the BBC News channel: “Almost all of the products had gone up in price and these are… the basics range and value range products.
“They are much higher than the official inflation statistics of 6pc and 7pc, which is what is used to argue for the uprating levels of benefits and what is used as the official inflation figures.”
No, that’s to fail to understand what an inflation basket is. Sure, pasta’s gone up, potatoes down. The net inflation effect is the change in price times the percentage of the food budget that is spent upon each item. If we want to get properly complex we also include how people substitute – buy less of one, more of the other – as relative prices change.
Trying to insist that this last is not so is betraying an entire ignorance of how an inflation basket is used.
Some 17 out of the 30 items tracked either rose slower than wider food cost inflation or dropped in price over the period.
In its research, the ONS said: “Highly experimental research, based on web-scraped supermarket data for 30 everyday grocery items, shows that the lowest-priced items have increased in cost by around as much as average food and non-alcoholic drinks prices (with both rising around 6pc to 7pc over the 12 months to April 2022).“There is considerable variation across the 30 items, with the prices for six items falling over the year, but the prices of five items rising by 15pc or more.”
Inflation is the net effect of all of these price changes. Jack Monroe did ask an interesting question. Pity she appears unwilling to accept the answer.
“ONS experimental data” .
WTF is experimental data? Sounds like CMMB (Computer Model Made up Bullshit).
Would you trust the ONS? It seems standard now that statisticians produce the results they’re required to. Hospital waiting lists are falling, we’re told. Although the time it takes to be treated by the NHS continues to rise. ONS is a government agency. One should extend all the confidence on would to a used car salesman.
The lived experience is that those with the least money to spend get hit harder by inflation. One reason is, of course, that they tend to buy fast turnover items. So the price rises on them come much quicker. And a higher proportion of their spending is that inflation basket. I’m probably an extreme case but my personal inflation rate is probably negative. My large spending item this week is a French couture hose handbag for a friend’s birthday present. All the label she could possibly want. Marked down from 480€ to 250. The Mexican restaurant meal we ate last night with copious margaritas was the same bill as last year. You think I’m worried the monthly electricity bill went up a hundred?
Monroe seems to be injecting herself a lot into current affairs lately. Does she perhaps have a book coming out ?
See my post from a few days ago of actual recorded spending. Food spending bounces around so erratically as to be unusable as a statistic, you can have a +20% one year followed by a -25% the following year.
Adolff – it’s where they’re not entirely confident in the sample, or the mechanism used to produce the data. Above, they’re doing web-scraping to get the prices.
Fairly minor changes to the document structure could easily screw with the scraping process, and bugger up the data.
Looking at Asda for Spuds, the structure doesn’t seem to include the h-product microformat, so you have to translate and match Asda’s “co-product__price-per-uom” to Sainsbury’s “pd__cost__per-unit”.
Changes to those classes are beyond the ONS’ control.
Does the calculation require the consumer to buy the spuds at Asda, the pasta at Lidl and the beans at Tesco? Cos that’s not very realistic for poor people on the bus. Besides which it doesn’t matter if some smartarse can find a way to buy a little cheaper, the problem for the poor is the lack of discretionary money and the ability to change your spending profile.
However, I have a modest proposal. The experts who know what’s best for the poor should provide weekly diet sheets with the best prices for what poor people are supposed to eat. And eat the samw things themselves.
I guess Ms Monroe is too young to have seen it, but Val Singleton explained inflation every week on Nationwide with her basket of groceries.
Then she explained how banks work on The Money Programme.
It is remarkable how well informed we were in the 70s and 80s if one paid attention.
@Ottokring
And that Christmas candle thing made out of coat hangers and tinsel on Blue Peter obvs
Ducky McDuckface- Yes, you’d think it’d be easier with bots and online prices but there are lots of complications. I did ‘my supermarket dot com’ yonks ago, you can compare your normal shop across all the supermarkets. It would often tell me Waitrose was cheaper for something like my milk. Ok i thought lets do the cheapest items with them….but then when you go to buy it..its out of stock. Of course they weren’t out of stock of milk, or even semi skimmed milk, but they were out of semi-skimmed milk at that price. So yeah you’ve really got to buy it and have it in your hand, or at least be in the shop and have it in your hand to know its a real price.
Is what she said true? Do cheap boots really only last 6 months and expensive ones 10 years?
If so where can I buy them from?
Substitute effect- yeah 85p chocolate milk for 500ml.. i’ve been buying for a while (well over a year). It jumped last week to 1.25. I’d been buying it because other soft drinks seem to be about 1.25-75 so relatively good value. And it was also a rare example of the 500 ml x 2 being cheaper than (albeit a diferent brand) 1ltr choc milk at 2.10. Its not a coincidence i bought the 1ltr bottle last time. Of course could go further down the substitute path…if i bought plain milk and the choc powder, even cheaper. Or buy one of those smelly pens to sniff whilst i drink (we did this with our elevenses milk at school). Or just have milk.
Rhoda – interesting question, probably not. The ONS are looking for average changes in price, not trying to find the most expensive or cheapest basket.
The likes of Asda, Tesco and Sainsbury’s are all doing a Lidl/Aldi price match on certain goods. Tesco are also aggressively showing the Clubcard price on the shelves, next to the headline price.
Back during the 2020 lockdown, we ended up getting stuff delivered by Asda. The website occasionally played silly buggers on out of stock or pricing, but if you waited a bit, removed the offending item from the basket, it could magically be back in stock and sometimes cheaper. Played that game quite a bit for a few months.
“other soft drinks seem to be about 1.25-75 so relatively good value”: eh? Two litres of fizzy water cost 23p at Sainsbury’s – maybe it’s cheaper at Tesco or Aldi. Make up your drink with the cordial of your choice: in summer we tend to have dandelion & burdock, and elderflower, to hand.
In summer I like “iced coffee” made with run-through from the coffee filter and cold milk from the fridge. Delish: much better than one of those High Street coffees I tried once. And milk is pretty cheap stuff.
I read lots of advice about shopping around & good buys & cheaper options. Trouble is they’re all given by middle class people with lots of time on their hands. And not mothers with two demanding squalling kids in tow & short 3 hours a day for everything needs doing.
23p?!? It’s 17p at Aldlidl…
dearime- Yes, I’m referring to Spar local shop prices for getting and drinking immediately and how the substitution effect worked in practice when one price goes up, but yeah in terms of raw value there’s many more options. Talking about iced coffee, I saw (or noticed is probably more accurate) Camp for the first time in a longtime which mum used to give to us. Might be one of those brands that have declining but steady sales that Tim talks of now and then.
Rhoda, I’m guessing you don’t have a Lidl where you live ‘cos everyone knows that Aldi immediately open up a shop over the road from it. The rumour was they were owned by the same family that had a fall out – a bit like Adidas and Puma.
If it isn’t reduced for quick sale, buy one get one free / half priced or on some other special offer I won’t buy it unless I really want it. It’s difficult to change the habits of a lifetime – a bit like looking in skips for something useful…..
Oh yeah, all those peeps moaning that us old gits had it easy are going to get a dose of the interest rates we suffered, the inflation we suffered, the blackouts we…..etc. etc.
David,
While not quite as extreme, back in 2010ish the (lowest bidder) ‘assault boots’ on issue, would have their soles rot and crumble within about two years of light use (while, being made from cheap leather, they were painful to get broken in and managed to be both hot on a warm day, and leaky in the wet)
I invested in a pair of US boots (UK importer having a clearance sale, so got them half-price) which are still going strong now – even though, now the RN’s shifted to wearing Action Working Dress (blue fatigues) as default rig instead of the #3 Ryanair look, they’re getting a lot more use.
So, cheap crap might get you two years, but invest some money in a decent brand (5.11 Tactical in my case, there are other good suppliers) and you can indeed get a decade.
On the matter of boots, every DM wearer was aware of this. It was claimed shift workers only needed one pair between three. Are DM’s still the same? My most recent pair are on their last soles after 20 years. (And you just can’t get the same impact with the side of the head with industrial grade trainers)
Some of that difference is likely that the ‘value crisp’ has a tighter profit margin than the more ‘premium’ brand.
So, in effect, the better off have been paying extra *this whole time* and the less well of are just starting to.
So, not being affected disproportionately but just now coming into parity with.
Jack Monroe’s initial claim was fresh ready meals are the same price as they were a decade ago, pasta had gone up from around 20p/500g to £1/1kg or something like that.
She ignored the fact that fresh ready meals are a new technology (just in time production, computerised inventory and ordering etc) and likely costs and wastage have decreased while budget pasta is entirely dependent on commodity prices with very little profit or value added.
“I’m guessing you don’t have a Lidl where you live ‘cos everyone knows that Aldi immediately open up a shop over the road from it.”
There are three Lidls within walking distance of here. I think our nearest Aldi is 2.5 miles away. In the other direction.
“The rumour was they were owned by the same family that had a fall out – a bit like Adidas and Puma.”
The fall-out was in the Albrecht family which owns Aldi. There are two Aldi chains, and they’ve agreed not to compete with each other: whichever establishes first in a country gets a free run at it. They’re known internally as “Aldi Nord” and “Aldi Sud”, but the names don’t really mean anything these days; we’re Aldi Sud in Britain, for example.
Lidl was founded by a bloke named Schwartz. The Story there goes that he realised that the name “Schwartz Markt” wouldn’t exactly be good for business, so used the name of one of his partners instead.
Re shoes, I find the sales people always insist that they should be too narrow. Except for a bloke squatting in the aisle at Woollies. He just said, ‘Do you want a wider pair.’ I nearly fainted.
Still, the masking tape holds the heels together, and the holes in the top don’t affect the function, so they’ll do for a while longer.
The gaffer tape holding the shoes together is just an indication that they’re now comfortably broken in.
Ms Jack Monroe: the leftie who resigned from well paid public sector job to be a whinging single mother on benifits
One food price inflation I’ve noticed is Morrisons have ended many of their own brand products
eg Value & normal: cup-a-soup and dried rice & pasta products (eg golden rice; cheese, chick & mush pasta…)
There’s probably more, but I haven’t noticed as not near what I buy
As a consequence of Jack’s campaigning on this issue, it was highlighted that supermarkets were both reducing the number of items in their value ranges and increasing prices disproportionately. Her meetings with a supermarket boss confirmed this, and in the case of that supermarket, led to them rewinding their policy of moving away from the value range.
The whole point of the Vimes Boots Index was NOT to track the poorest being hit harder, it was to STOP that from happening, as a matter of social justice.
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