An official website of the United States government
United States Department of Labor
An official website of the United States government
United States Department of Labor
The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information,
make sure you're on a federal government site.
The site is secure.
The
https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any
information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.
Building on the February 2023 Beyond the Numbers (BTN) article “Getting less for the same price? Explore how the CPI measures "shrinkflation" and its impact on inflation”, BLS has created a series of research indexes to estimate the impact of downsizing and upsizing in the CPI beginning with December 2014 data. These research indexes are calculated by imputing price changes in the month a product size change occurs for a product active in the CPI sample, instead of using its observed price change.
BLS monitors the frequency of downsizing and upsizing in the CPI sample as described in the February 2023 Beyond the Numbers (BTN) article. These data are also available below.
These research indexes are calculated outside of the official production system and are at greater risk of calculation errors than the official CPI indexes. Additionally, they differ from the official indexes in both scope and aggregation and may not have the same data quality as the official published indexes. Customers should be aware of the caveats and limitations of any of these products they consider using.
The CPI sample is designed to measure average change over time in the prices paid by the urban consumers for a market basket of material goods and services. The CPI sample is not scientifically designed specifically to measure upsizing and downsizing frequencies in the marketplace.
Although the methodology used to create the counts and indexes is similar to that of the article, some modifications have been incorporated to facilitate on-going estimation and analysis. Users should be aware that data from earlier time periods does not exactly reproduce the results presented in the article.
The monthly time series data will be released on a quarterly schedule, with releases occurring in January, April, July, and October. Release of data may be delayed due to resource availability and other constraints.
Research indexes are available for food at home, all item strata within food at home, and a select group of additional item strata that have had downsizing or upsizing observed since 2015. Additional aggregate indexes may be added later depending on resource availability and other constraints.
R-CPI-SC, December 2014-present (XLSX)
R-CPI-SC, Frequency of downsizing and upsizing, January 2015-present (XLSX)
Additional information on downsizing and upsizing in the CPI is available in the Beyond the Numbers article Getting less for the same price? Explore how the CPI measures "shrinkflation" and its impact on inflation.
Last Modified Date: May 31, 2024