A man named Mitchell set out the other day to chronicle just how expensive life in America has become. He walked into a locally owned grocery store in California’s wine country and flashed his business card. “I’m from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” he murmured to a supervisor.
Mitchell’s tablet directed him to his first stop, Aisle 10. He closed in on his target: a two-pound bag of brown sugar. He ran down a checklist. “Granulated,” he said. “Loose. No organic claim. It’s a national brand. Dark brown pure cane sugar.” He noted a change. “There’s a resealable zipper on the bag, and the bags they sold in the past didn’t have that.” He typed in the price: $3.49. “In August, the price was $3.29,” he said.
Intel like Mitchell’s is one of the reasons we know that inflation hit a four-decade high this summer, and that, in September, prices were up 8.2 per cent from what they had been a year earlier. He is one of more than three hundred part-time “economic assistants” who, each month, fan out across the nation’s liquor stores and body shops, dental offices and doggy day cares—around twenty-eight thousand locales in seventy-five urban areas. They note whether an item in a category such as “uncooked beef roasts” has added a few cents to its price tag or shed a few ounces of meat. The Consumer Price Index, which tracks changes in how much urban dwellers pay for a representative “market basket of goods and services,” is largely based on this process.
Secrecy is part of a data collector’s job description, and Mitchell approaches his duty with a fervor befitting less prosaic government agencies. In the field, he declined to share his last name, the name of his late pit bull, the nature of his other work (“I do my own thing”), or his age. (Was he in his fifties? “Probably.”)
He cannot allow anyone to look at his computer. “If I’m in a coffee shop, I can’t have my screen right under a camera,” he said. The businesses he monitors and the brands he tracks are hush-hush. “There are some pretty stiff penalties for sharing,” he said. “And they do include jail time.”
Confidentiality matters because participation in the index is voluntary, and access to the data could give competitors an edge. “We strictly measure inflation,” Mitchell said. He makes his rounds in a Honda, with supplies that include a gallon of water, a bunch of bananas, and sunscreen.
After the sugar expedition, he drove to another strip-mall grocery store in Sonoma County. He had fourteen products (“quotes”) on his list (“schedule”). Taking each item off the shelf, he scrutinized it, insuring that the organic ketchup (still on sale for $3.48) was indeed a “prepared liquid form,” and that the lemon pepper (up thirty cents, to $4.49) still contained garlic and onion. Most prices hadn’t changed: French bread was still $3.99; chocolate sandwich cookies, $6.29; unflavored gelatine, $17.49.
The types of goods and services Mitchell tracks are based on the shopping habits that local residents report in the Census Bureau’s Consumer Expenditure Survey. The items change over time. If a product disappears from stores permanently, he hunts for a similar substitute. The trickiest items to replace are luxury cars and clothing. If he’s tracking a blouse, say, stock might change every few months: “The next time you go in, it’s got to be a short-sleeved blouse, button down, fabric content a hundred-per-cent cotton, same brand.”
Mitchell’s favorite trips are to movie theatres. His most stressful visits involve knocking on doors to gather rent figures. “Once every few years, we get someone who’s very anti-government,” he said.
As banal as his work can be, Mitchell is aware that it drives things ranging from interest rates and tax brackets to government funding for school lunches. The C.P.I. affects the income of nearly eighty million people by helping determine Social Security benefits, military pensions, and food-stamp allowances. Mitchell says he’d never take advantage of a sale on the job, but that now and then he’ll drive to Oregon, where it’s cheaper to service his car and there is no sales tax. “I’ll load up on laundry detergent,” he said.
He has a sense of where prices are heading each month, but he remains tight-lipped. “That’s like the biggest taboo question,” he said. He has a colleague named Sam who has a C.P.I. joke that he likes to tell: “A Bureau of Labor Statistics economist is asked, ‘Is the glass half empty or half full?’ To which he or she responds, ‘It’s a sixteen-ounce glass with eight ounces of water.’ ” ♦
