The Frum CPI - Rosh Hashana update

Now featuring Israeli data!

If you’ve been around here long enough, you’ll remember how, back in January, I created a basket representing the typical weekly grocery list for a family of two parents and four young kids. I added up what those grocery items would cost based on the prices listed on the website of Lakewood’s SuperStop store.

The weekly total for that first basket came to $256.58. Three months later that had risen to $265.88. Well, having checked in once more, that total will now hit our theoretical family for a scary $291.26. That’s a 9.5% increase in less than six months. Compare that with the US Bureau of Labor Statistic’s seasonably adjusted CPI rate of 4.7% over roughly the same period.

Both dairy and bakery products rose in the 10% range over those months, with flour (+25%) and sugar (+37%) being significant contributors.

But all that’s just Lakewood. Now that I’ve got kids (and grandkids) living in Israel, I’m curious about the costs they’re facing. Well, as one of my sons just informed me, the Israeli government provides a fascinating service through the משרד הכלכלה והתעשייה (Ministry of Economy and Industry) allowing detailed and regularly updated price comparisons between 36 supermarket chains. (Bricks and mortar and online stores were treated separately even if they were owned by a single company.)

Buying a single unit of each of the items in their “shopping basket” would cost between ₪2,486 and ₪3,208 with the average cost being ₪2,881. Of course, that’s just a single item of each - hardly enough to sustain our typical family of six. Not to mention that it’s a very rare household that would actually buy even one of all 166 items in the basket. The average costs are just a quick and clever way to identify less expensive chains, but they’re hardly comparable with our Lakewood CPI.

So I focused on the grocery chain that, from the perspective of cost, is closest to the national average (קשת טעמים), found 26 items that are similar to corresponding items in our existing CPI basket, converted the costs to US dollars, and added it all up. Bear in mind that the meat items were what the Ministry identified as “regular kosher,” so choosing mehadrin meat of one flavor or another might impact prices.

Assuming I was largely successful in finding genuinely comparable items, the Israeli basket cost, in fact, just one-third of what the same items would have gone for in Lakewood. That food costs more in America than Israel is probably not going to cause anyone serious shock. But that the difference is so significant certainly surprised me.

Have any of you had different experiences? Is the quality of Israeli food noticeably lower?