Reading inflation in your own trolley

On 15 October 2026, Statistics Botswana published the Consumer Price Index for September. The headline number: annual inflation of 7.8%, down from 9.3% in August.

That is genuinely good news after a hard year. But it is not your number.

Nobody buys the CPI basket. You buy your basket — the same maize meal, the same oil, the same bread, from the shops you actually use. The national average is a useful compass; it is not a receipt.

Here is what the September release actually said, and how to work out what it means for your own trolley.

What the September numbers said

The detail inside the release matters more than the headline:

• Headline inflation: 7.8% year on year, down 1.5 percentage points from August (9.3%).
• Food & non-alcoholic beverages: 4.5% year on year — but down 0.6% month on month. The food index fell from 163.2 in August to 162.3 in September.
• Food contributed 0.7 percentage points to the annual rate — the same as housing and utilities. Transport was the biggest contributor (4.0 points).
• What fell: vegetables led the monthly decline (−3.0%), followed by the sugar, jam, honey and confectionery group.
• Where you live matters: annual inflation was 7.4% in Cities & Towns, 7.7% in Urban Villages and 8.6% in Rural Villages.

Read that again: food prices were lower in September than in August, even while the annual figure stayed positive. Both things are true at once. Month-to-month movement is what you feel at the till; year-on-year is what erodes your budget slowly.

Why 7.8% is not your number

The CPI is an average across all households and all goods. Three things pull your personal rate away from it:

1. Your weights are different. Food and non-alcoholic beverages are 13.55% of the national CPI basket. If you are feeding a family, food is a much bigger share of your spending — often a third or more. A 4.5% food rise hits you harder than a 4.5% average suggests.

2. Your items are different. The national basket contains hundreds of items. Yours has maybe 30. If the ten things you buy most moved differently from the average, your rate moves differently too.

3. Your shops are different. The same item can carry different prices in different chains and even different stores in the same chain — we wrote about why here. Your mix of shops is part of your personal inflation rate.

How to measure your own food inflation

You do not need a statistics office. You need a month of slips and fifteen minutes.

1. Pick a fixed basket. Choose 10–15 items you buy most months — maize meal, cooking oil, bread, milk, sugar, rice, chicken, eggs, tea, soap. Keep the list fixed.
2. Use the same item and pack size. A 12.5 kg bag of maize meal, not "maize meal". If the pack size changes, note it — that is a price change too.
3. Record the unit price. Price per kg or per litre, not the shelf price. Unit price is the only fair comparison across pack sizes.
4. Compare the same month a year ago — or, if you do not have that history, compare this month with three months ago. One month is noise; a quarter is a trend.
5. Weight by what you actually spend. If oil is 15% of your food spend and tea is 3%, oil's change matters five times more.
6. Write down substitutions. If you switched brands, your basket changed — that is a decision, not inflation.

An illustrative example

Say your monthly basket is five items (numbers are illustrative, not real shelf prices):

Item	Last year	This year	Change	Your monthly spend
Maize meal 12.5 kg	P105	P112	+6.7%	P112
Cooking oil 2 L	P55	P62	+12.7%	P124
Bread 700 g	P14	P15	+7.1%	P60
Milk 1 L	P17	P18	+5.9%	P72
Sugar 2 kg	P32	P33	+3.1%	P33

Add it up: P223 last year, P240 this year — about +7.6%. That is hotter than the 4.5% national food figure, because oil — your biggest line — ran hot. That is the point: your number is yours.

Three things that distort your number

• Promotions. A promo price this month and a normal price next month looks like inflation. Compare like with like, or note the promo.
• Pack-size changes. Same price, smaller pack is a price rise. Unit price catches it; shelf price does not. We go deeper on that here.
• Store switching. If you moved shops, your basket changed. That is worth knowing — but do not confuse it with price inflation.

What to do with your number

If your personal rate is running hotter than the headline, do not panic — do the arithmetic:

• Rank your items by monthly spend, not by percentage change. The top three lines are where the money is.
• For the top three, check the unit price at one or two other shops you can reach. A 12% rise on oil is worth a detour; a 12% rise on tea is not.
• Buy seasonally where you can — vegetables were the biggest monthly fall in September for a reason.
• Track three months before changing habits. One month is weather; three months is climate.

If your number is cooler than the headline, keep doing what you are doing — and keep measuring. Households that know their numbers are the ones that notice when something changes.

Where Breadwinner fits

Breadwinner reads your slips and shows unit costs for every line, so your personal basket is measured from what you actually paid — not from an average. Free accounts keep 7 days of history; Premium keeps 90 days, enough to see a quarter-on-quarter trend. We also publish a monthly Basket Watch from aggregated, consenting shoppers' data — community numbers, with the sample and period stated.

You do not need to beat the statisticians. You just need to know your own number.

Scan your first slip — free, 10 slips a month, no card: app.breadwinner.deals

Sources

• Statistics Botswana, Consumer Price Index — September 2026 (published 15 October 2026): headline 7.8%, food & non-alcoholic beverages 4.5% y/y and −0.6% m/m, contributions, regional rates. PDF
• Statistics Botswana CPI overview page (September 2026 inflation rate 7.8%). statsbots.org.bw
• Bank of Botswana CPI table (September 2026: 7.8%). bankofbotswana.bw

Figures checked 1 November 2026. Official statistics can be revised; the method above works regardless of the month.