Ground beef, coffee, eggs, milk, and bread — priced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in July 1996, and priced again in July 2026. The food did not change. The dollar did.
Same items, same government price series, thirty years apart. Nothing on the shelf improved. The pound of beef did not get heavier and the dozen eggs did not become thirteen — so the whole of the difference sits in the money, not the groceries.
That is the part worth carrying into a retirement conversation, because income that is fixed in dollars meets a register that is not.
Every price below is the Bureau of Labor Statistics average price for the named item, U.S. city average, in the named month. The basket is my own composition — five staples nearly every household buys — and a different basket would produce a different multiple. BLS itself notes that average prices measure the level in a given month, and that its price indexes are the better measure of change over time. The receipt is an illustration built on published levels. Read the shape, not the pennies.
A pound of ground beef is the same pound of ground beef it was in 1996. What changed is the measuring stick. Hold the basket still and the arithmetic runs the other way: the dollar that covered a full share of these groceries in July 1996 covers thirty-eight cents’ worth of the same basket today. That erosion did not arrive in a crisis. It arrived in ordinary years, at two and three and occasionally nine percent, while the balance in a savings account looked unchanged.
This is the mechanism, not a mystery. When the supply of dollars grows faster than the supply of groceries, each dollar claims less of the shelf. I wrote a book about how that happens and who decides — The Creature That Ate America — but the receipt makes the argument without a single footnote. Every household in the country has been running this experiment for thirty years.
I think we are living through historic times, and I think a reset is coming that very few households are positioned for. The receipt above is what currency debasement looks like in a calm decade — steady, quiet, and permanent. My concern is what the same force does in a turbulent one, to money that is parked in fixed dollars: a pension without a cost-of-living adjustment, a bond ladder, a settlement, cash that was set aside in 1996 dollars and will be spent in 2036 dollars. Company pensions — including most utility pensions, the sharpest example I know — pay the same dollar figure in year twenty that they paid in year one. The register does not.
I will not put a date on any of it, and nothing on this page is a market call. What I do is sit down with you and work out which parts of your retirement income are promised in fixed dollars, which parts keep pace, and what the gap between those two lines does to a thirty-year plan — before the receipt answers the question for you.
A receipt cannot tell you what to do — it can only tell you what has already happened. Which parts of your retirement income are fixed, which parts keep pace, and how much of the next thirty years depends on the difference is a conversation, not a chart.
Start the conversation