Working Paper
Measurement of retail output and the retail revolution
Abstract: The computerization of retailing has made price dispersion a norm in the United States, so that any given list price or transactions price is an increasingly imperfect measure of a product's resource cost. As a consequence, measuring the real output of retailers has become increasingly difficult. Food retailing is used as a case study to examine data problems in retail productivity measurement. Crude direct measures of grocery store output suggest that the CPI for food-at-home may have been overstated by 1.4 percentage points annually from 1978 to 1996.
Keywords: Retail trade;
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Authors
Bibliographic Information
Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia
Part of Series: Working Papers
Publication Date: 1998
Number: 98-5