When our inflation infeelings don’t match the CPI

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For most Americans, we just lived through the highest period of inflation in our lives. And we are reminded of this every time we go grocery shopping. All over TikTok, tons of people have posted videos of how little they got for … $20. $40. $100. Most upsetting to us: an $8 box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Food prices are almost 30% higher than they were five years ago. It’s bad. And those new, higher prices aren’t going away.

At the same time, prices are no longer inflating at a wild pace. For the last two years, the rate of inflation has slowed way down. And yet, our fears or feelings that things will spiral out of control again? Those have not slowed down.

This mismatch has been giving us all the …. feelings. Inflation feelings. Infeelings.

On our latest show: we sort through our infeeltions. We talk to the economists who have studied us. We learn why our personal inflation calculators don’t always match the professional ones.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.0	What drove the young man named Rocky to the cinnamon toast crunch that day?
0:12.4	His inner child, perhaps, memories of Saturday mornings and cartoons and pajamas, maybe, but there he was in the cereal aisle, holding a box of cinnamon toast crunch and
0:23.1	losing his mind.
0:25.4	Okay, y'all, I might be an unc for real, because since when is cereal $8 a box?
0:31.9	What the hell?
0:33.1	Rocky turned to TikTok to sort of work through his feelings about this apparent cereal inflation.
0:39.1	Like, am I tripping?
0:40.3	He's addressing a friend here.
0:42.0	Gee, am I tripping? Has cereal always been this high?
0:44.6	I guess. I don't know.
0:46.3	Okay, he acting like as normal. Maybe I'm just broken.
0:50.2	Inflation has been and continues to be one of the single biggest economic concerns for Americans,
0:56.1	according to a regular survey from Gallup. And that anxiety is very easy to understand.
1:01.8	People are worried about the impact of tariffs. There are rumblings of possible inflation upticks
1:07.8	to come. And maybe most obviously, prices are indeed way up compared to before
1:14.8	the pandemic. Like, groceries are 30% more expensive than they were just like five or so years
1:21.2	ago. And look, those prices are not going to come down. That is simply not how inflation works.
1:27.0	We always have
1:27.6	some inflation. Prices go up. The question is at what rate do those prices go up? And two years ago,
1:35.1	the rate of inflation did come way down. It's been decently close to the target inflation rate
1:41.6	of 2% for a couple years now. So inflation has cooled a lot,
	...

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