Comment by bartnp

Funny, for me it seems terrible exactly for the opposite reason. These kinds of baskets are too heavily weighted by things that go relatively down in costs like technology and airplane tickets.

The monetary reason is that the reason those things go down is because of technology advances and not because of changes in the value of the currency. Inflation should be about the currency, and less about what cool advances people are doing to make cheaper TVs and better websites

The practical reason is that if the basics like rent and food go up relative to wages, then a lot of people end up crushed by the basics alone and have no disposable income left for the cool stuff. The baskets are often too biased towards spending patterns of those who live the good life and for whom luxuries actually matter