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Inflation struck a series of exasperating blows at consumer pocketbooks last week. Manufacturers posted higher prices for autos, appliances and coffee, and the Government granted the nation's airlines an increase in fares.

General Motors, the acknowledged pacesetter in auto prices, announced the largest increases in more than a decade. The window-sticker price of the average G.M. car will go up 3.9%, from $3,070 on 1969 models to $3,189 on the 1970 line. The company called the rise "modest" in view of much larger increases in the cost of labor and many materials. G.M. said that $38 of the $119 rise was for improved equipment, such as glass-fiber-reinforced tires, larger engines and disk brakes.

General Electric lifted its wholesale prices by about 3% on electric ranges, refrigerators, freezers and home laundries. General Foods' Maxwell House raised the wholesale price of coffee by 5%. The air-fare increase, approved by the Civil Aeronautics Board, will be effective Oct. 1. The average first-class fare will go up 7%, the average coach fare 3 1/2%. It will be the second increase this year for the financially ailing airlines. In March, the CAB approved a 4% rise.

The U.S. consumer might think that there is no end in sight to runaway prices. Yet last week Chairman William McChesney Martin Jr. of the Federal Reserve Board told Congress that the nation is "at the tail end" of its siege of inflation. "We're making slow and steady progress," Martin insisted. "There are indications that we may be getting to the end of very high interest rates." Maybe so, but last week interest rates on short-term Government notes jumped to still another record high. Example: 6 1/2% on a $356 million issue of New York State tax-free notes. The prices of many industrial materials--among them copper, nickel, steel pipe, chlorine and abrasive powders--also continued to inch upward, promising subsequent increases in the cost of the goods and services that consumers buy.

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