I was cleaning out an old bookshelf and came across this 2003 Grizzly catalog. Coincidentally, I'd just received a 2023 mailer. I was shocked by the increases in price.
Some highlights:
Standard 14" band saw: $375 vs. $800
Standard 6" jointer: $400 vs. $900
4-piece Bessey K-body clamp set: $150 vs. $350
I know nothing about how inflation works, so I'm not sure whether this tracks with the price of bread or whatever, but it was eye-opening.
According to the bureau of labor statistics, $375 in 2003 is $635 in today's dollars: https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=375&year1=200301&year2=202309
It's true that yearly inflation is a combination of a bunch of different categories of goods and services, and that some of those categories will be greater or less than the overall inflation rate.
There's also things like sales volume, potentially having negative margins to gain market share, etc to talk through. I wouldn't know where to begin looking for that information.
Excellent information! Yeah, it seemed to me that the cost increase was more than just inflation. As I said elsewhere in the thread, my impression is that their reputation for quality tools has grown, so that must account for some of the extra price. The 2003 catalog is their 20th anniversary. Maybe that means they were too established to be selling under cost to gain market share?
We'll see if we're doing the same thing with a Harbor Freight catalog in 20 years.