Consumers Price Index And Retail Food Prices

A monthly report on consumer price movements, including statistical tables and technical notes.

The heightened commodity price volatility of 2008 and 2010 and the subsequent acceleration in U.S. food price inflation associated with those market shifts generated questions about farm and food price movements. This report addresses the nature and measurement of retail food price inflation. Contents of this report: Intro.; Consumer Demand; The Consumer Price Index (CPI); Consumer Income and Expenditures; Recent Food Price Inflation; Federal Spending for Domestic Food Assistance Programs: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps); Child Nutrition; The WIC Program; Additional Commodity Assistance Programs; Foreign Food Aid. Charts and tables. A print on demand report.

A monthly report on consumer price movements, including statistical tables and technical notes.

Over the past 10 years, the growth of nontraditional retail food outlets has transformed the food market landscape, increasing the variety of shopping and food options available to consumers, as well as price variation in retail food markets. This report focuses on these dynamics and how they affect food price variation across store format types. The differences in prices across store formats are especially noteworthy when compared with standard measures of food price inflation over time. Over the past 20 years, annual food price changes, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), have averaged just 3 percent per year, while food prices for similar products can vary by more than 10 percent across store formats at any one point in time. Since the current CPI for food does not fully take into account the lower price option of nontraditional retailers, a gap exists between price change as measured using scanner data versus the CPI estimate, even for the relatively low food inflation period of 1998-2003.