Update on Price Inflation - What Was That CPI Figure?

The penny has officially become worthless.  I finally had to admit this the other day when I found a pile of them in a parking lot, just as if they had been smelly old cigarette butts dumped out of a car ashtray by someone in a hurry.

A few months ago in an earlier post, I whined about the price of M&Ms, or more accurately about the dollar's decline.  I noted therein that my favorite little candies had gone from 5 cents when I was a girl in the 1950s, through 55 cents when I had my own little store in the 1990s, to 99 cents at my local supermarket in 2011.   So today, I was not particularly surprised to see that my little packet of goodies is now $1.19 in the same supermarket.

But when I did the calculations, I realized that's a 20 percent increase in three years.  That's almost 24 times the 5 cents I paid in the early 1950s....

What??  That may be par for the course, but let's ask the obvious question:  What was that CPI figure again??

 

Thanks to Wikipedia and Scott Ehardt for this image.