This is NPR's life kit, I'm Mary L. Sagarra, and I'm here today with a very special guest co-host

Stacy Vanixmith. Hello, Maryo. I'm very excited to be here. Yeah, so you may know Stacy from her time at the

Indicator or at Planet Money. She is now an economics correspondent for NPR in GDiam.

We're gonna talk about inflation today because it is affecting all of us in very very painful ways.

It really is. So I spoke with one woman actually who has five children. Her name is Donna Dunn.

She lives in Booker, Texas. She does the books for a health clinic. She's a numbers person.

Okay. She's very very good with math. But she said that her grocery bill for her family went from

around $700 a month to more than $1200 a month. Wow. And it just destroyed her budget.

And she as a result has become this kind of encyclopedia about how much things cost.

The price of a gallon of milk went from $2.99 on Mondays, $3.99 the rest of the week.

Now that same exact gallon of milk is $4.99. Doesn't it? $4.89. Deli Ham, $6.99.

A dozen thick cut pork chops, $13.14. And she also knows where to go to buy different things.

Look down at the jar of mayonnaise and I'm at the United and I say, oh, they want $6.49 for it here.

They want $5.99 for it down at the lows. And if you go down to the dollar general, you can get it for $3.75.

So Donna's been making all these cutbacks everywhere. She can think of they don't eat out anymore.

They've switched from cans of soda to bottles of soda. I still eat ham sandwiches, but not as much.

I used to put five slices now, only put three.

Wow. It's super painful. Even though she is really good with numbers and she is a wizard with a

budget, she still just cannot make the math work. And so there are bills that just aren't getting paid.

I have a dentist bill that I haven't got paid yet because I have to work it into the budget.

That's already split so tight.

Yeah, inflation is super painful for a lot of people. And that's why we're talking about it today.

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