Real inflation: what has happened to the price of an ordinary shop

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🛒 Why your shop doesn't feel like the headline rate ✕

The headline inflation rate is not your basket

The official rate averages ~700 items — rent, transport, haircuts, streaming — weighted by what the whole country spends. Food is only about a tenth of it. If your money mostly goes on groceries and essentials, your personal inflation rate can run well above or below the headline. That's what this tile tracks: how the price of each everyday item is actually moving, from the same ONS collection that feeds the official numbers.

Why movement, not prices in pounds

ONS stopped publishing average shelf prices (the "pint of milk" series), and item-level price quotes for groceries ended when supermarket checkout data replaced field collection. What is still published monthly is an index per item — so the tile shows each item's movement: change since January, and on the month. Direction and speed answer "is my shop getting worse?" more directly than a price tag did.

Reading the country columns

US prices are the official BLS city average (May–Jun 2026); German prices are typical supermarket prices (early 2026) — both are dated snapshots, updated by hand, converted at today's exchange rate. The gap moves when the pound moves, so a "cheaper than America" result is partly a currency story. Products aren't perfectly identical across countries (sizes, grades and farming standards differ), and UK food carries no VAT while some US states tax groceries. The UK price is a crowd-sourced supermarket average (no official UK shelf price is published at the moment); ONS's scanner-data average prices are due later in 2026 and will replace it. Some everyday items — butter, sugar, tea, coffee, cucumber, carrots, mushrooms — have no published UK average anywhere, so those rows show their price movement and no prices at all: a German figure with no British one beside it is not a comparison. Nothing here is ever a guess.

Why "since January" and not "on the year"

The shopping basket behind these indices is rebuilt every January, and the measuring stick resets with it — so item-level changes are only exact within a calendar year. A year-on-year figure stitched across that reset would be quietly wrong. The official food inflation rate at the top of the tile is the honest annual number, and it is comparable year to year.

UK data: ONS consumption segment indices — research-grade microdata, updated monthly alongside the inflation release, Open Government Licence v3.0. FX: ECB reference rates via Frankfurter. General information, not financial advice.

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