Inflation is killing your future

[superadmin]

I’ve noticed something peculiar happening over the years. When I was a teenager, I would accompany my parents to the Giant hypermarket in our neighbourhood to pick up groceries. The month’s haul – which would fill up the shopping cart – would cost my dad around RM500 or so. And every so often, he would lament about how when he was a teenager growing up in the 60s, things were so much cheaper.

But of course, as most teenagers do, I brushed off my dad’s comments and just accepted this increase in prices over the years as a natural phenomenon. In my mind, price hikes were just something that happened, like gravity or growing old – no explanations were needed.

But as I got older, and especially after I started working, I began taking this seemingly natural phenomenon much more seriously. After all, it was thinning my own wallet and I didn’t like it. I wondered why I had to pay increasingly higher prices for goods that pretty much remained the same over the years? I mean, how much can you improve sugar or spinach or milk? And yet, I was asked to cough up more and more money for it over the years.

But again, this wasn’t an urgent enough matter for me to merit a deep dive – until now, that is. The RM500 that would fill up my parents’ shopping cart 15 years ago barely fills up a quarter of mine today. Most alarmingly, this increase in prices seems to be accelerating, all while wages remain largely stagnant.

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