The root of what’s going on here can feel obvious: blame inflation, which picked up in mid-2021 and throughout 2022. But that isn’t really the issue anymore, at least not at the current rate, because inflation is coming down. The actual problem here is prices.
They’re not going up nearly as much as they were in, say, the middle of last year, but they’re by and large not declining en masse, either. And in most cases, they won’t get back to where they were in the Before Times.
Inflation is the rate at which prices are increasing.
They aren’t increasing that much right now. They’ve reached a plateau, the problem is that it’s a high plateau.
Hence, the problem right now is not inflation, the problem is getting used to the “new normal” prices.