We recently reported on the price of a gallon of milk in the Bluegrass State, and how it had increased 121.21% since President Trump left office. Grocery prices in general have risen. We also noted that January inflation, year-over-year, rose 7.5%, which was higher than the average hourly wage increase of 5.7%. Two days ago, I tweeted that regular gasoline had jumped 20¢ per gallon.

Now comes The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Utility bills are soaring in the Philly region and so is customer outrage

Peco gas bills are up 38% from last year. PGW’s are up 17%. “I have never paid this much for heat in the winter.”

by Andrew Maykuth | Sunday, February 27, 2022

Also see: Pa. electricity prices will be rising by as much as 50% this week. Here’s how you can save.

Byron Goldstein closely monitors the energy usage at his Glenside home. So when he got a $651 bill from Peco Energy for combined electric and gas usage in January, 37% more than the $477 he paid the previous January, he knew something was off.

Goldstein discovered that Peco’s gas supply charge skyrocketed since January 2021, accounting for most of the increase. Goldstein, 74, was unsatisfied by the company’s response to his phone calls, so he filed a formal complaint to the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission, urging the state regulator to roll back Peco’s “outrageous and irresponsible” price increase.

He was not alone. Across the Philadelphia area, thousands of utility customers opened their bills in recent weeks to learn that the cost of heating their homes had soared much more than the 7% inflation rate. Social media platforms lit up with posts from unhappy customers, directing their wrath at energy companies, regulators, and politicians.

“I have never paid this much for heat in the winter,” wrote a Philadelphia resident posting on Nextdoor.com, where several threads contained hundreds of comments venting about the price increase.

There’s more at the original, but it needs to be noted: these price increases came before the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

According to charts in the Inquirer original, natural; gas prices are actually significantly lower now than they were in 2008, but they’ve jumped significantly this winter:

The price has indeed gone up: A typical Peco customer who used 150 hundred cubic feet (ccf) of gas was billed $171.25 in January, up 38% or $46.90 from January 2021, according to PUC data. A Philadelphia Gas Works customer who used the same amount of gas was billed $261.71 in January, up 17% or $37.91 from a year ago.

Electricity bills also went up in Pennsylvania on Dec. 1, though not as much as gas bills.

With price increases like these, just how real does that reported 7.5% inflation rate feel?

The Inquirer reported, last December, that cable television and internet service rates from Comcast have increased, as have prices from AT&T and SlingTV.

The Wall Street Journal reported that NBC had a 42% drop in viewership for the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, compared to the 2018 games in Pyeongchang, South Korea, something I attribute to NBC’s ‘free’ coverage being dominated by curling and other lower-interest events, while the events people are most interested in, ice skating and Alpine skiing, were being shown more often on Peacock, an internet streaming service which, naturally, has a subscriber fee. That’s just more money out of people’s pockets, or they miss out, a form of inflation that goes unaccounted.

The obvious question, at least to me, is: if inflation was ‘only’ 7.5%, what items went up less than that to counterbalance those which increased more?