The Familinomics Price Index
- Don Harrold
- Feb 10
- 4 min read
Moving forward, Familinomics will evaluate the President's claims by tracking the change in food prices. This will be done by producing a monthly price index for a pre-selected market-basket of grocery items at five separate and unrelated grocery stores. Each month’s result will be shown in relation to the base index of 100, which is the cost of the market-basket priced in the first week of January, 2025.
Why?
President Trump commented during his campaign that he was a fan of the late 19th century, not least because of his perceived value of tariffs. But there’s so much else of that period’s governance for him to appreciate, such as lack of regulation and a compliant Congress. What else existed to the benefit of the very wealthy and connected was a lack of objective information upon which to make evaluations. We’re already seeing it as the CDC’s MMWR returns, yet devoid of anticipated studies on the threatening H5N1 Bird Flu and the Census Bureau’s removal of certain datasets.
Given his campaign promise to dramatically lower the cost of groceries upon entering office – and the actual inability of the Executive to impact prices short of a Nixonian Wage-Price Freeze – I anticipate that one of the casualties of data removal, and even alteration, will be within the Commerce Department’s Consumer Price Index. This single datapoint will hopefully serve, if nothing else, as a check on what’s being reported by the Federal Government.
Background
The Familinomics Index is essentially a reboot of what I once described as a “kitchen-table” project created for a now-defunct website called PracticalDad. I created that Index in late 2010 out of curiosity about the impact of the Federal Reserve’s then-novel Quantitative Easing programs upon the family as there was considerable debate about the extent to which QE would be inflationary. That Index ran monthly from late 2010 to mid 2016, when I ended it due to health and other family demands.
While I’m not a trained economist, I am both a highly curious data nerd and borderline anally retentive when it comes to how things affect my family. Decades ago, the US Chamber of Commerce published a national cost-of-living survey and local Chambers could opt to participate so they could see their conditions in relation to other localities as well as the nation. My job as an intern was to set up the program template for the local Chamber; I subsequently returned to that Chamber after graduation from college and overseeing the survey’s data collection was one of my responsibilities. It was there that I met and spent time learning from the US Chamber’s research economists, experience which I used a quarter century later with the PracticalDad Index.
The other aspect of both the original and this market-basket was that as a stay-at-home dad who did the shopping and cooking for a family of five, I knew what the typical family on a budget ate.
The secret? Establish a set of rules for the index and adhere to them rigorously.
The Rules
The Market-basket will consist of 36 items, in seven categories:
o Bread
o Cereal
o Dairy
o Meat
o Produce/canned
o Produce/fresh
o Staples
2. The pricing will occur within the first five days of each month.
3. The pricing will occur at the same five pre-selected grocery stores within my county. These five stores are unrelated in ownership to one another and comprise five types of stores:
o A locally owned family grocery store
o A regional domestic grocery store
o A foreign owned regional grocery chain
o A foreign owned national grocery chain
o Walmart
4. Prices will not be the weekly sale prices, but the regular prices as shown on the item’s shelf label.
5. Priced items will be Store Brand (SB) unless there is no alternative; there is only one item which has a national brand for several of the stores. Meat will be priced in Value Pack (VP) quantity.
6. Some items are specified as “Std” (Standard), which means that they are a size within a particular range. For canned and bottled goods, they are close to the same size within a small variance from one store to another; for Store Brand Jelly, the Std will be either 30 or 32 ozs. Likewise for some canned produce goods. In order to track instances of shrinkflation, I have kept a list of what items are originally sized per store and will adjust the monthly price should that occur.
7. If there is any question about a price, my default rule is what would I purchase if I were buying for a family on a budget? It sounds minute, but it has occurred. Should I invoke that rule, the ongoing pricing will reflect that to ensure continuity.
Comments
1. What’s the difference between the foreign-owned regional grocery chain and the foreign-owned national grocery chain? The former is a regional grocery chain that was founded as a traditional American supermarket, then purchased decades later by a European grocery chain. As such, the physical store size is typically American in that it’s larger, and there are far more brand offerings on the shelves, even within product types. The latter is actually an international grocer that opened stores across the country within the past two decades, but has a more European style as it’s physically smaller and has far fewer brand offerings within product types.
2. The only store that will be identified is Walmart because there’s no other store comparable to it in terms of scope. Walmart is simply…Walmart. When I started the first Index in 2010, Walmart was an up-and-comer, but almost a quarter of all 2025 grocery dollars spent are at a Walmart.
3. Stores will not be identified within the monthly report.
4. This does not purport to be indicative of what’s happening nationally. There can be different prices for an item in different regions of the country. This survey is designed solely to provide the single datapoint of the direction and rate of change for the cost of a market-basket at a specific location in the country.
January 2025 Results
The average cost of the market-basket, priced from January 1 – 5, 2025 was $106.03. That result will serve as the baseline index of 100.00 moving forward.
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