The first rule of inflation is, you don't talk about inflation

Look, I am not an economist (she said, dusting the cobwebs from her Substack¹.) I wouldn’t want to be; it seems like a thankless job and one I would be terrible at. But as a middle class, middle aged woman who is mostly in charge of procuring the food for my household, this week’s Grocery Wars discourse is right in my personal-if-not-professional wheelhouse. And god, what a discourse it is. It is irresistible. It is the prime standing rib roast of discourses. (Much too dear for an ordinary weeknight, but at the holidays? Let’s live a little.)

How did one woman’s soup-shopping expedition (in response to one man’s admittedly silly tweet about Doordash’d lobster tails) trigger a mass media man meltdown into Pepe Silvia-style trutherism over the cost of chicken thighs? I think the answer is, basically: it’s an election year and people are freaking out. Economic pessimism is bad news for incumbent presidents, certain political strategists in the anti-Biden camp are keen to stoke said pessimism for this reason, and so even ordinary co-rumination about the price of groceries, especially by commentators with high-follower Twitter accounts, is received by other commentators as attempted political sabotage of a piece with those goofy gas station stickers with a pointing Biden: “I DID THAT!” (There’s one of these affixed to a gas pump near my house which I now wish I’d taken a picture of; if you don’t know what I’m talking about, here you go.)

Hence, online, a factual observation about how much things cost is never just an observation; it is political warfare, and dangerous misinformation, and it is missing important context. Sure, things have gotten more expensive than they used to be — the formerly-$39 bag of dog food is now upwards of $50, the almond milk I used to buy for $1.29 costs like sixty cents more, etc — but don’t you realize your grocery bill would be less expensive if you bought store brand dog food? Or if your dog ate less? Or if you ate your dog?

Anyway, as for why this matters so much to the people it matters to so much, I defer to Matt Yglesias, who is… also not an economist, but probably could be, if he wanted to, unlike yours truly. I’m not really interested (okay, maybe a little) in the psychology of the guys who threw themselves into investigating one woman’s tweet about her grocery bill like the lead detective in an Agatha Christie novel.

“You can lie about soup and you think nobody knows. But there are two people who know. One is Le bon Dieu - and the other is Hercule Poirot.”

But insofar as I can chime in on this from the dog food aisle, I just want to casually observe how utterly insane this brand of rhetoric looks to normal people, whose understanding of the economy is rooted largely if not entirely in their personal, individual experience of working for money that they then exchange with others for goods and services. A lot of stuff is expensive now! Noticeably moreso than it was a couple years ago! This may be a politically inconvenient fact, but it’s also just… how things are? Normal people talk about high grocery prices in the same way they talk about the weather; if your reflexive response to this is a shriek of contempt, let alone to accuse them of lying, you desperately need to get out more.

As for the high-prices discourse, there’s been a lot of discussion lately about whether it’s facts- or feelings-based: is the economy bad, actually, or is it all just vibes? I think the answer, unfortunately, is that it kind of doesn’t matter on an issue where vibes drive voting patterns. If you point out on the public internet that things seem more expensive and that people understandably dislike this, you’ll be met with a cavalcade of data points (“Inflation has slowed! And wages on average have outpaced inflation! Americans are better off today than they were a few years back!”) that may or may not be encouraging at the macro level but which simply do not register at the normal-person level. Inflation may have slowed, but people are not going to feel grateful that the $50 bag of dog kibble is going to keep costing fifty very expensive dollars. And if you got a raise last year —and perhaps briefly imagined using the extra money to save for a house or pay off your credit card debt or put something aside for your kid’s college education — it does not feel good to realize that all you’ve actually done is kept pace with rising prices enough to keep treading water, living paycheck to paycheck. These are the kind of bad vibes that no bar graph can compete with.

I’m not saying this is Biden’s fault, or anyone’s fault, or that anyone can fix it. I have zero policy suggestions on this front. I’m just a girl, standing in front of a bag of Purina Beefy Bits, observing that I, too, remember when the bag cost fewer dollars. Which was nice, while it lasted.

1. Sorry, I know it’s been awhile. I paused my blogging here over the summer after becoming overwhelmed by a situation I may someday write about, if I can stand to.