CPI for all items rises 0.2% as gasoline and shelter prices rise; food prices decline

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Thu Apr 30, 2015, 11:41 AM - Edit history (4)

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Economic News Release
USDL-15-0609

Consumer Price Index Summary

Transmission of material in this release is embargoed until 8:30 a.m. (EDT) Friday, April 17, 2015

Technical information: [phone] [e-mail] www.bls.gov/cpi
Media Contact: [phone] [e-mail]

CONSUMER PRICE INDEX - MARCH 2015

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.2 percent in March on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index declined 0.1 percent before seasonal adjustment.

Increases in the energy and shelter indexes more than offset a decline in the food index and were the main factors in the rise of the seasonally adjusted all items index. The energy index rose 1.1 percent as advances in the gasoline and fuel oil indexes outweighed declines in the electricity and natural gas indexes. In contrast, the food index declined 0.2 percent, with the food at home index posting its largest decline since April 2009.

The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.2 percent in March, the same increase as in January and February. Along with the shelter index, a broad array of indexes rose in March, including medical care, used cars and trucks, apparel, new vehicles, household furnishings and operations, and recreation. The index for airline fares, in contrast, declined for the fourth time in the last 5 months.
....

Not seasonally adjusted CPI measures

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) decreased 0.1 percent over the last 12 months to an index level of 236.119 (1982-84=100). For the month, the index rose 0.6 percent prior to seasonal adjustment. ... The Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W) decreased 0.6 percent over the last 12 months to an index level of 231.055 (1982-84=100). For the month, the index rose 0.7 percent prior to seasonal adjustment.
....

Facilities for Sensory Impaired

Information from this release will be made available to sensory impaired individuals upon request. Voice phone: [phone], Federal Relay Services: 1-800-877-8339.


Read more: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm

---

I added the bolding.

Cryptoad points out the significance of the CPI-W. It is used to calculate Social Security's Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA):

Based on the increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI-W) from the third quarter of 2013 through the third quarter of 2014, Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries will receive a 1.7 percent COLA for 2015.

Consumer Price Index Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What goods and services does the CPI cover?

The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W) BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups. Major groups and examples of categories in each are as follows:
FOOD AND BEVERAGES (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, full service meals, snacks)
HOUSING (rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)
APPAREL (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)
TRANSPORTATION (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)
MEDICAL CARE (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)
RECREATION (televisions, toys, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions);
EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software and accessories);
OTHER GOODS AND SERVICES (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeral expenses).

The CPI-U is used by the Treasury Department to set the interest rates on I Bonds.

I Savings Bonds

How do I Bonds earn interest?

Interest on an I Bond rates is a combination of two rates:
1.A fixed rate of return which remains the same throughout the life of the I Bond

and
2.A variable inflation rate which we calculate twice a year, based on changes in the nonseasonally adjusted Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U) for all items, including food and energy (CPI-U for March compared with the CPI-U for September of the same year, and then CPI-U for September compared with the CPI-U for March of the following year).

[jwirr]

1. Obviously this is from last month - I could not believe the price of fruit yesterday. $8 for a

watermelon and $7 for oranges. $4 for berries. There was an article on DU yesterday that was talking about organic foods and the poor - forget organic - the poor cannot afford fruit at all.

[RandySF]

3. It's a bad time of year for watermelon, isn't it?

[jwirr]

5. Of course but the clerk told me that the fruits are grown in Mexico - I would assume that the

season there is year round. Nice warm weather. Cheap labor. Not much further for the transportation. I am thinking that this is just the market taking advantage of the seasonal argument.

[RandySF]

9. It still has tone shipped

[fasttense]

6. Because they switch up the basket of food when estimating inflation

what you are getting with the CPI with food is an estimate of what it costs to survive and NOT an estimate of inflation in food prices. See when steak goes up they look at hamburger (just an example) for their basket to estimate food CPI. So if you can only eat steak or you refuse to eat beans 7 times a week, then you will see a much larger inflation in food prices than what the CPI reports.

I'm not sure what part of the country you live in, but here in TN watermelons and berries have NOT come in yet. So the huge price for those items here is due to transportation and packaging costs and not necessarily inflation. Out of season fruit always costs more unless China or parts of South America are doing a food dump to drive out competition. (Our grocery stores were flooded with strawberries last year. I think they may have been from China or South America but I can't say for sure. But my local grown, chemical free, strawberries sold for 25% less because of the dumping.) Of course we never have oranges in season in my part of the country so I rarely buy them.

But if you want a fair price for in-season, local grown, chemical free food I would recommend you find a medium to small farmer's market in your area. You can find bargains there especially if you haggle with the farmer near closing time. I know I would rather sell my produce at half price than have to take it home and watch it rot or give it away. I recommend medium to small markets because a lot of the larger farmer's markets are being taken over by huge industrial farmers (pretending to be small), and non-farmer wholesalers and they put premium prices on their chemical laden crops.

[progree]

18. I thought it was the CHAINED cpi where they play the substitution game

between steak and hamburger etc., thus resulting in a lower measure of inflation (and thus lower SS COLA if that's what they end up using - something Obama proposed a year ago but dropped from his 2015 budget). But I suppose even for the regular CPI, they eventually have to adjust to what people are buying, somehow.

[wordpix]

14. low income people can learn how to budget for organics

I'm on Soc. Sec. so am now low income and I'm 100% organic. I afford it with community garden space/growing my own, zero food waste, buying some food online, some at farm markets and the rest in the supermarket, which carries a lot of organics. It's doable. You have to know how to cook and bake from scratch---if you don't, you'll be buying prepared organics and that cost is truly out of sight.

My food bills are only about 20% higher than they were before my 100% organic diet. I no longer buy wine, which also keeps the cost down.

BTW, would you rather have high food bills or cancer/neuromuscular diseases caused by pesticides used on crops and in animal feed? Many of these chemicals are systemic, meaning you can't wash them off since they're in the plant systems. You get them through the food chain and water.

When I switched to 100% organic about 1-1/2 yrs. ago, a number of my neuromuscular disorders disappeared or noticeably decreased including severe leg cramps (totally gone), involuntary twitching of fingers and lips (totally gone---I thought I was on the road to Parkinson's) and arthritis in my hands (almost gone; now occurs only rarely). Also, I am a Stage 4 cancer patient and my cancer has not recurred during and after treatments ended 7 mos. ago.

[progree]

15. Yup, its worth the difference

Organics aren't entirely free of pesticides -- some drift from neighboring fields, some are in the soil from previous farming operations, or accumulate from drifting from neighboring fields. But Consumer Reports in the latest issue tested all kinds of produce -- organic and non-organic -- and found organic to be much lower across the board -- and worrisome levels in many of the non-organics. So it is for real, and definitely cheaper than treating and living with illness.

[hobbit709]

2. Coulda fooled me at the grocery store.

the only declines I saw was sale prices on crap I don't buy.

[Alkene]

4. I wonder how this will affect my weekly visits to the food bank. n/t

[Dont call me Shirley]

7. And food prices rise in 3..2..1..

[Cryptoad]

8. Of course ,,,,, gas and food

are not figured into the Cost of Living index!

[mahatmakanejeeves]

10. Let's look at that.

There is something that doesn't seem to be a gummint thing, assembled by the Council for Community and Economic Research, called the cost-of-living index. They say:

The Cost of Living Index consists of six major categories: grocery items, housing, utilities, transportation, health care, and miscellaneous goods and services. These major categories in turn are composed of subcategories, each of which is represented by one or more items in the Index. Separate component indexes are published for each of the six major categories. We’re not concerned with the extent to which consumers actually purchase the individual items in the Index. The 60 items have been chosen solely to show interarea price differences in the categories they represent. What’s important, in calculating the Index, is the ratio of an urban area’s average price to the average price of the same item nationwide. When we use a pound of whole frying chicken to represent poultry products, we’re assuming that if an area’s price for this item is 10% above the nationwide average, its prices for poultry products as a whole also are about 10% above the nationwide average.

The gummint puts out a cost-of-living index too. That's done by the Census Bureau: Prices: Consumer Price Indexes, Cost of Living Index. I looked at the .pdf version of Item 728 - Cost of Living Index--Selected Urban Areas. It lists grocery items and transportations as things it takes into consideration. There's a spreadsheet too.

What the BLS puts out is a consumer price index. There's an explanation of that at Cost-of-living index:

Application to price index theory

The United States Consumer Price Index (CPI) is a price index that is based on the idea of a cost-of-living index. The U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) explains the difference:

"The CPI frequently is called a cost-of-living index, but it differs in important ways from a complete cost-of-living measure. BLS has for some time used a cost-of-living framework in making practical decisions about questions that arise in constructing the CPI. A cost-of-living index is a conceptual measurement goal, however, not a straightforward alternative to the CPI. A cost-of-living index would measure changes over time in the amount that consumers need to spend to reach a certain utility level or standard of living. Both the CPI and a cost-of-living index would reflect changes in the prices of goods and services, such as food and clothing that are directly purchased in the marketplace; but a complete cost-of-living index would go beyond this to also take into account changes in other governmental or environmental factors that affect consumers' well-being. It is very difficult to determine the proper treatment of public goods, such as safety and education, and other broad concerns, such as health, water quality, and crime that would constitute a complete cost-of-living framework."

In the OP, the BLS says:

Increases in the energy and shelter indexes more than offset a decline in the food index and were the main factors in the rise of the seasonally adjusted all items index. The energy index rose 1.1 percent as advances in the gasoline and fuel oil indexes outweighed declines in the electricity and natural gas indexes. In contrast, the food index declined 0.2 percent, with the food at home index posting its largest decline since April 2009.

So it seems that both the CPI and the COLI take food and fuel/transportation into consideration.

HTH.

[Cryptoad]

11. .....

The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.2
percent in March, the same increase as in January
and February. Along with the shelter index, a broad
array of indexes rose in March, including medical
care, used cars and trucks, apparel, new vehicl
es, household furnishings and operations, and recreation.
The index for airline fares, in contrast, declined fo
r the fourth time in the last 5 months.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf


yea,,,, it that index without Food and Gas that is used to figure the SS cola for old poor folks,,,,,,

[mahatmakanejeeves]

12. CPI-W methodology

I'll add the CPI-W information to the OP. Thanks for writing.

I think that the CPI-W does include food and transportation:

Social Security's Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA):

Based on the increase in the Consumer Price Index (CPI-W) from the third quarter of 2013 through the third quarter of 2014, Social Security and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) beneficiaries will receive a 1.7 percent COLA for 2015.

Consumer Price Index Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What goods and services does the CPI cover?

The CPI represents all goods and services purchased for consumption by the reference population (U or W){.} BLS has classified all expenditure items into more than 200 categories, arranged into eight major groups. Major groups and examples of categories in each are as follows:
FOOD AND BEVERAGES (breakfast cereal, milk, coffee, chicken, wine, full service meals, snacks)
HOUSING (rent of primary residence, owners' equivalent rent, fuel oil, bedroom furniture)
APPAREL (men's shirts and sweaters, women's dresses, jewelry)
TRANSPORTATION (new vehicles, airline fares, gasoline, motor vehicle insurance)
MEDICAL CARE (prescription drugs and medical supplies, physicians' services, eyeglasses and eye care, hospital services)
RECREATION (televisions, toys, pets and pet products, sports equipment, admissions);
EDUCATION AND COMMUNICATION (college tuition, postage, telephone services, computer software and accessories);
OTHER GOODS AND SERVICES (tobacco and smoking products, haircuts and other personal services, funeral expenses).

[progree]

13. Link please

it that index without Food and Gas that is used to figure the SS cola for old poor folks,,,,,

I haven't heard that one before.

[Cryptoad]

16. I what I am told every year by my representives ,

when I whine and complain about my cola being so low while the price of Food and Gas sky-rockets,,,,,,, if they are included I want a list of the store they shop in to determine that all this Food is going down!

[progree]

17. If they told you that, they were pulling your leg. Maybe you can call them out on it

the next time they tell you that. Pls see #12.

I haven't seen any CPI index that says food is going down -- beyond an occasional month here and there might happen to be negative. Gasoline is of course a lot lower than it was in 2008. Or last year at this time.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.nr0.htm