Dan Dugan appears without warning at supermarkets, auto lots, and funeral homes across Eastern Massachusetts, a government agent with a thick black computer tucked under his arm and a veil of secrecy surrounding his work. His mission: Track the prices of hundreds of items, from apples to used cars to caskets.
Dugan is an economic assistant at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and he works on inflation’s front line, collecting information used to calculate the Consumer Price Index, the best-known gauge of inflation.
Comments
Does Mr. Dugan include in his shopping investigations items whose containers have been downsized but the price remains the same? This smaller-container-same-price policy seems to have been the most common method of inflating consumer grocery costs for the past several years, and I don't think it has been taken into account by the government.