A block of cheese is
Mum sent me into the supermarket last week to grab a block of cheese. It was fourteen dollars. FOURTEEN. For cheese. I came back and just held it up like it was evidence in a crime show.
She wasn't surprised. She said "yeah, welcome to the cost of living crisis." Which is a phrase I've heard about a thousand times this year without anyone explaining what it actually means.
So I went looking. Here's what an 11-year-old can figure out in a weekend.
"Cost of living" basically means: how much it costs to do normal life. Food. Rent or mortgage. Power. Petrol. The doctor. The bus. School stuff. When all those things go up faster than people's pay, you've got a crisis - because the same paycheck buys less cheese.
The grown-up word for prices going up is inflation. A bit of inflation is normal. A lot of inflation is what we've been having. Some of the reasons are stuff that happened far away - a pandemic, a war, supply chains breaking - and some of it is stuff happening here, like houses costing a wild amount and interest rates going up to try to slow inflation down (which also makes mortgages more expensive, which is its own problem - I had to draw a diagram).
Here's what I notice as a kid:
My friends' parents talk about money in a way they didn't two years ago. Quieter. More tired.
The school is doing more "bring a gold coin" days because actual school funding isn't stretching.
My dance class went up
The number of "FREE" things on the supermarket app is suspicious. Free if you spend $80. Free if you buy three. Free if you sign up. Nothing is actually free.
What I still don't get: if everyone agrees it's a problem, why is it so hard to fix? I asked Dad and he said "because there isn't one cause, so there isn't one fix." Which is annoying but probably true. Tax does some of it. Wages do some of it. Building more houses does some of it. The Reserve Bank does some of it with interest rates. The supermarkets (there are basically two, which feels like a clue) do some of it.
This election a lot of parties are going to promise to fix the cost of living. They can't all be right. Some of them are probably even a bit wrong on purpose, because "we'll fix it" is a way better poster than "it's complicated and will take ten years."
If you're a kid reading this, here's the thing I keep telling myself: noticing is not nothing. Most adults didn't start paying attention to this stuff until they had to. We've got a head start. By the time we're voting, we'll already know what fourteen-dollar cheese feels like.
And if anyone reading this works at a supermarket and can explain the cheese situation to me, I have a contact form and a lot of questions.