Twenty-four-year-old dental hygienist and newlywed Zoe Dippel made an interesting discovery that went viral on TikTok. She was flipping through her sister-in-law’s photo album when a lengthy grocery receipt from June 20, 1997 fell out. One hundred twenty-two items were listed on the receipt, including all sorts of food items and things like diapers, wipes, etc. needed for raising twin babies. A total of $155.34 was spent on this purchase. Dippel posted a video featuring the receipt, which has been viewed 2.8 million times over the past three weeks. Apparently, many young TikTokkers commenting on the video were surprised by just how low various prices were, and wanted to know just how much the entire basket of 122 items would cost now.
Dippel followed up with another video showing the comparison of 1997 to 2025 prices. She was able to enter the same items into an online curbside pick-up app to discover what the same grocery chain would charge for the same goods today. Over 28 and a half years, the total price for the 122 items had risen to $504.11. The magnitude of this increase in the cost of the basket—let’s call it Zoe’s Price Index (ZPI)—over this period means that ZPI has been increasing at an annualized rate of 4.2 percent.
The ZPI’s rate of increase isn’t out of line for an unadjusted price index. For example, the annualized rate of increase of median US home prices over roughly the same period is even higher, approximately 4.8 percent. On the other hand, median household income has only increased at an annualized rate of a little under 3.1 percent between 1997 and 2024, confirming widespread public perceptions that incomes haven’t been keeping up with the cost of living. Dippel was understandably downbeat about how people are supposed to afford such rapid grocery price increases. Her videos underscore just how important the issue of affordability has become to many people.
While all price indices are inherently flawed by the inability of economists to directly observe or measure the subjective valuations existing inside the heads of consumers and savers and thus are unable to assign weights to different prices properly or even decide which method to use for combining weighted prices into a singular index value, with ZPI one doesn’t really have to worry about the arcane nonsense that bothers most econometricians when constructing a price index like hedonic adjustments, imputed prices, chaining, or geometric averaging. The ZPI’s total price is already a plausible “cost of living” estimate without any adjustments.
The compelling thing about the ZPI is that it represents a reasonably diversified, real-world selection of essential staples that were once needed by a particular family and are still commonly needed by many families in similar circumstances today. The total price on the grocery receipt was an actual out-of-pocket expense back in the day (at least with respect to goods typically found in a grocery store), and the same items are still a reasonable proxy for what costs a family with a couple of babies might need to bear in order to live today. It seems reasonable to assume that neither the items in the ZPI basket nor the basic needs of middle-class consumers trying to raise a family have changed all that much over the years, and almost everyone can easily relate to a grocery receipt.
So how does the official Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics compare to the ZPI? The increase of the CPI between June of 1997 and December of 2025 translates to an annualized rate of increase of 2.5 percent in the cost of living. Not only is the CPI’s rate of increase significantly lower than the ZPI’s rate of increase, the CPI rate of increase is low enough to imply that median household incomes have been rising, not falling, in real terms over that time span.
In other words, while real-world prices for consumer staples like those reflected in the ZPI or in median home prices has more than tripled since 1997, the official CPI has only just barely doubled. So are we really supposed to believe that we can eat 2/3rds as much food, change diapers 2/3rds as often, and live in only 2/3rds of a home as compared to the olden days of President Clinton, and yet still enjoy the same standard of living? Or is it more sensible to believe that the BLS games its statistics to make the politicians look good and to make stealth cuts to all the government benefit promises, tax deductions, etc. that are indexed to the official CPI?
While a few dissident economists have been complaining for decades about the BLS’s sketchy methods for calculating CPI, not many have paid attention to such details. On the other hand, millions of people are paying attention to Zoe Dippel and her grocery receipts. The damning divergence between CPI increases and ZPI increases is just too big to hide and just too unsettling for those struggling to make ends meet to ignore.
Continual inflation of the money supply and its pernicious effects—the steady erosion of the dollar’s purchasing power, the steady concentration of unearned wealth into the hands of large bank credit-fueled institutions and “entitlement” beneficiaries, and the deindustrialization caused by capital consumption and wasteful boom/bust cycles—is causing price increases that are surely just as crazy and depressing as Dippel concluded they were. Her reaction to the receipt comparison is fully justified. The latest Rothbard-Salerno measure of Total Money Supply (TMS) (which, in my opinion, understates the TMS and the current year-over-year rate of TMS increase, though it is much better than the official M2 measure of money supply) indicates that the rate of TMS increases has been accelerating and the Federal Reserve has essentially given up on fighting inflation in recent months.
As long as politicians still spout delusional fantasies about there being “virtually no inflation” in America, as long as Federal Reserve Governors still pretend that all our inflation problems are “transitory” and that caving in to political demands to debase the dollar even more rapidly is acceptable, and as long as news outlets keep taking a ridiculous make-believe price index seriously, Americans will need people like Zoe Dippel to keep speaking truth to power and to keep public discourse about prices grounded in reality.
