Which One Will Get Your Hard Earned Money?

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER!

One of our pet peeves is products or services with prices that appear to be going up faster than everything else. Is it just our perception or is it based on actual facts? In other words, is that product or service a “Deal” or a “Ripoff”?

Let’s find out.

You Want Facts – We Got Facts. But Exactly What Facts?

It turns out there is an excellent web site called Official Data that gives the prices of all goods and services in the Bureau of Labor Statistics consumer price index. This outstanding website was developed by Ian Webster, an engineer and data expert based in San Mateo, California. It takes the massive amount of convoluted inflation numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics site and presents it in an easy to read format.

For our purposes, we’re interested in the inflation numbers for the 410 categories of goods and services for which the Bureau site publishes price and inflation numbers. The Official Data site has a separate page for each one of these categories. Each page gives the inflation numbers for predetermined date ranges (a Start Year and End Year) but also allows you to search on a specific range of dates so long as they fall within the predetermined range.

Below is a picture of the top half of one of the inflation calculator pages, in this instance the one for Breakfast Cereal. Note that the three boxes at the left – Cost, Start year, and End year, are already filled in but you can change them (see the brief explanation under the picture of each of the five numbered areas). These are the areas of interest for our analysis.