Two years noting down the price of bread in a notebook

August 2024. Half a dozen fresh eggs, brand M, at the neighbourhood supermarket: €2.40. I write down the date, the price and the brand. The notebook has a yellow cover.

January 2025. The same eggs: €2.85. The cashier, Amparo, asks me if I’m doing a PhD. I tell her I’m not, that I’m noting it down just in case.

June 2025. €2.99. I switch brand because mine goes up and disappears. I settle for Ibericaquellevalobueno: €2.79.

December 2025. Ibericaquellevalobueno has gone up to €3.05 and the old brand is back: €3.20. I laugh to myself in aisle five. I write in the notebook: ‘old trick’.

June 2026. €3.35 for six eggs. I look back: in two years, that half kilo of protein costs me 40 % more. The official CPI for food and non-alcoholic drinks in Spain over those two years, measured by the INE, is around 17 %.

The suspicion I underlined at the bottom of the page back in 2024: the average basket is not my average basket, because I don’t buy truffles or oysters, I buy eggs and bread and oil. And the trick isn’t that prices go up: it’s that the things I buy every day go up, while the things I buy one Sunday a year go down.

Keep noting them down. A price notebook on the kitchen table costs three euros and contradicts the CPI better than any headline.