What's $80 worth at the supermarket these days? About 18 blocks of butter. Or 40 loaves of bread. Or roughly one week's worth of meat for a family of four.

That's the size of the increase Rest of North Island shoppers faced in 2024: their annual grocery bill rose from $15,362 to $15,443, an $81 jump that marks the smallest year-on-year climb since the cost-of-living crisis began. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-regional)

On its face, it looks like relief. After years of brutal price surges, the rate of increase has finally slowed to a crawl. But zoom out, and the picture shifts.

In 2020, before inflation took hold, the average Rest of North Island household spent $12,615 on groceries. By 2024, that figure had climbed to $15,443. That's $2,828 more every year, every year, for the rest of your life unless something changes.

Here's what that means in practice: a family that could afford a weekly shop of $242 in 2020 now needs $297 to buy roughly the same basket of goods. The extra $55 a week doesn't sound catastrophic until you realise it's permanent. It's not a one-off shock; it's a new baseline.

The slowdown in 2024 matters, but it doesn't undo the damage of 2021 to 2023. Those three years added $2,747 to the annual grocery bill: $311 in 2021, $1,066 in 2022, and $1,370 in 2023. Even with 2024's modest $81 increase, the cumulative effect is staggering.

And while the rate of increase has eased, the direction hasn't reversed. Prices aren't falling. They're just rising more slowly. For households already stretched thin, that distinction is cold comfort.

The data also reveals something else: the Rest of North Island, which covers everywhere from Gisborne to New Plymouth to Napier, has tracked almost identically with national trends. There's no regional anomaly here, no quirk of local supply chains. This is the story of New Zealand's inflation crisis playing out in one of its most diverse regions.

So what does $80 extra a year actually buy you? Not much. But what it represents is this: a year where things got slightly less worse. For families who've been battered by five years of relentless increases, that's not nothing. But it's not victory either.

The question now is whether 2024's slowdown is the start of a genuine stabilisation, or just a pause before the next surge. The data doesn't answer that. But it does show that even when inflation eases, the cost of living doesn't reset. The new normal is $2,828 higher than the old one, and that's where we're starting from now.