A TikTok Receipt Shakes the System Zoe Dippel wasn’t trying to launch an economic revolution. She was just cleaning out an old photo album when a grocery receipt from 1997 fell out. It listed 122 household items—including diapers, baby wipes, and food essentials—totaling $155.34. Curious, Dippel ran the same items through a 2025 online grocery app. The result? $504.11. What she accidentally created was a real-world metric that cuts through all the statistical fog: a Zoe’s Price Index (ZPI) that shows a 4.2% annualized increase in cost of living since 1997—nearly double the official CPI figure of 2.5%. Let that sink in: What the government claims is inflation is off by a factor of two. The Consumer Price Index Is…
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