While RNZ reports that soaring bills are putting household spending on ice, there's a region where grocery spending appears to have literally frozen in the statistics: Wanganui's food price data tells a story not of cost-of-living pressure, but of something far stranger.

In 2010, Stats NZ recorded Wanganui households spending $14,652 on groceries annually. By 2011, that figure climbed to $15,404. It ticked up again in 2012 to $15,641, then stayed perfectly flat through 2013 at exactly the same number.

Then 2014 arrived. And Wanganui's grocery spending suddenly collapsed to $7,798. a drop of almost exactly 50% in twelve months. (Source: Stats NZ, food-price-index-detailed)

This wasn't Wanganui families suddenly discovering bulk buying or switching to home gardens. This was a data collection failure, likely a change in methodology or sample size that rendered the numbers incomparable to previous years. The figure of $7,798 remains the lowest in the entire 21-year dataset, requiring you to go back to 1993 to find anything similar.

Here's why this matters beyond one regional dataset: when households across New Zealand are genuinely struggling with grocery bills. when interest rates, insurance premiums, and power costs are all rising simultaneously. we need reliable data to understand what's actually happening. Wanganui's missing $7,843 represents a blind spot in our national picture of cost-of-living pressure.

The timeline reveals the problem clearly. From 2010 to 2013, Wanganui's grocery spending tracked upward in line with what you'd expect: modest increases year-on-year, reflecting both inflation and growing household consumption. That four-year period showed normal variation. Then the 2014 figure appears, and it's not just lower. it's impossibly lower, representing a halving of spending that no economic shock could explain.

Statistics New Zealand has since improved its regional food price methodology, but historical gaps like this one persist in the data. They create holes in our understanding of how different parts of New Zealand experienced the cost pressures of the 2010s. pressures that set the stage for today's affordability crisis.

For Wanganui residents trying to compare their current grocery bills to a decade ago, the official statistics offer no useful baseline. The 2014 figure is meaningless. The 2013 figure of $15,641 is the last reliable number in the series. and even that's now more than a decade old, before the pandemic, before the supply chain disruptions, before inflation hit 7.3%.

When we talk about soaring household bills putting spending on ice, we're relying on data to tell us how bad things have gotten and for whom. Wanganui's disappeared grocery spending is a reminder that sometimes the data itself goes missing first.