Inflation hits the weekly shop
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Inflation hits the weekly shop
words: Shamim de Brún
According to retail analysts Kantar, the average cost of groceries has gone up by about €780.
Kantar said prices rose by 5.5 per cent in the year to December, the most significant jump in 20 years.
The price of bread, milk and butter has gone up by 10-30 cents in recent weeks. While this can seem like mere cents, the cumulative increase adds up to about €15 a week for the traditional household that all these measures are still based off.
Bread, milk and butter are how we measure these increases, but this kind of inflation is not limited to the basics. It’s just more apparent in them. Pasta, another staple, has gone up by 6.4 per cent. Poultry has increased by 3.5 per cent. Coffee has climbed in price by 2.5 per cent. While butter, vegetable oils and olive oil have jumped by 4.4 per cent.
Everything is going up except wages. The national minimum hourly rate became €10.50 on 1 January 2022, increasing 10 cents. If these increases mean an extra cost of €15per week, then a minimum wage worker will have to work an extra 15hours to keep up. When you add all this together, these increases will cost the average joe substantially more than last year.
In some ways, this will hit young people harder than most. These stables make up a typical student’s diet precisely because they are cheap.
As has been well documented, the annual cost of utility bills has jumped by more than €500. Petrol and diesel do nothing but climb. They are now at least 40 cents more than this time last year. So now an average motorist will have to spend an extra €500 to keep their car on the road. That’s not including the increased toll charges that landed last year.
Totted up, the increases in those three areas alone come close to €2,000, a net figure, so people will need to earn about €4,000 to cover the cost of eating, heating, lighting, and driving in 2022.
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