Hot cross bun inflation

When I was in primary school we sang about Hot Cross Buns being “one a penny, two a penny”.

In those days, Britain still used pounds, shillings and pence. So, depending on which part of the nursery rhyme you subscribe to, the price of a hot cross bun was either 1d or 1/2d.

There were 240 pennies to the pound, so the lower price hot cross bun would be 0.2p in modern British currency. Or around 0.4 New Zealand cents.

Yesterday I picked up a hot cross bun Baker’s Delight store for $1.80.

In round numbers that’s 450 times the price of the nursery rhyme bun.

Mind you, it took a long time. According to Wikipedia, the nursery rhyme originated in 1798. That’s 214 years ago.

By my, admittedly rusty, school maths*, that represents an annual inflation in the price of hot cross buns of around 1.1%.

Did I go wrong anywhere with this?

• I used this formula: i = ( FV / PV) ^(1/n) -1