People value convenience and most people are poor cooks.

Grocery store margins are pretty high on prepared food.

Making a stew at home. Canned stew would be a few dollars a can in my area.

And $6 for a serving of stew is close to an order of magnitude more expensive than it is if you make it at home.

$5 a meal x 3 meals a day x 30 days a month is $450 a month. That's a decent amount of money, and it's questionable at best whether you would save that much in rent by removing a kitchen entirely from the amenities available to a tenant.

I'm not pissed off.

It's tiring watching people with no idea what they're talking about repeat the same "what about ..." arguments when professionals in the field have spent decades developing and maintaining models that have been proven over that time to be helpful.

It's also not a coincidence that nearly 100% of the people trying to poke holes in those models are people who disagree with the results generated from them, and that nearly 100% of those people don't have a clue about the topic at hand.

Of course a broad based index that is designed to represent the behavior of hundreds of millions of people is less accurate for you (or me, or anyone) personally than a model based solely on an individual's behavior. I don't know anyone on earth who would argue otherwise.

As a reminder, you started off by making a very lazy statement broadly criticizing a post that included well cited economic data showing that the inflation-adjusted median household income has increased substantially since the 1960s, which was in response to yet another terminally online doomer incorrectly claiming that your average American is worse off today than they were then.

You're now claiming that your issue with the provided data showing that people are overall financially better off today than they were in the 1960s is that that data isn't tailored to you (or any other individual) personally? I think that just demonstrates the validity of my original comment, because that's an absurd criticism.

FYI, you don't need to "advocate" for a personal price index. Track your spending over time and calculate it. If you want get much use out of it, you're going to want to incorporate the CPI data for your metro area as well (which exists and is publicly available) so you can both compare your spending to the median and backfill missing data as needed (for example, historical childcare expenses when you become a new parent).

Your post is just a more verbose version of what I said.

Your "concerns" are all well known and accounted for when calculating things like the consumer price index.