Journal Article

The retail revolution and food-price mismeasurement

Abstract: If a product sells for $3 this week at the local supermarket and $2 next week, what is the \\"real\\" price? What if that same product has a different price at a different store? Thanks to scanner technology, food prices differ a lot these days because they can be changed quickly and easily. How do our official statistics take these price movements into account? Not too well, according to Leonard Nakamura. In this article, he describes the retail revolution of recent years and how it has led to mismeasurement of food prices

Keywords: Food prices; Consumer price indexes;

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia

Part of Series: Business Review

Publication Date: 1998

Issue: May

Pages: 3-14