The Basket Tells The Story

The UK has been using a shopping basket of goods, as one of the measure of the cost of living since 1947.

A Typical UK Shopping Basket

This inflating shopping basket, has had items added, but also items removed over those 73 years. 

So not just a measure of inflation, but a barometer of eating trends in the UK as well. In fact its a rather big basket with over 700 goods and services being used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to calculate the rate of UK inflation. The inflation shopping basket actually involves 180,000 prices being measured in 20,000 UK outlets.

So when ever its published, the popular press likes to peer into the basket to see what's in, and what's out and remark upon it. The 2019 version had the usual number of revisions:

So IN:

• The Amazon Smart Speaker was an addition to the basket, representing the range of that type of product now available e.g. Google.
• Popcorn.
• Children's reading book/fiction (a surprise that!). 
• Dogs Treats - presumably to make up for taking the dogs dry food out?
• Dinner Plates.
• Portable Speakers.
• Electric toothbrushes. 
• Flavoured tea has also been added - Herbal and fruit teas were added in 2001, but just for one year, however have made a comeback as flavoured tea.
• Peanut butter

OUT:

• The three-piece suite and crockery sets, removed as people by single items and mix and match these days.
• Envelopes - people rarely write.
• Dry dog food - I don't know why.
• Hi Fi - we all stream music or use mobile devices.
• Washing powder was no longer needed as liquid was being used instead,

In the 2018 basket, women's leggings and mashed potato, replaced pork pies and lager sold in nightclubs, in the inflation basket. While this all seems a bit arbitrary, the items in the basket has to represent contemporary shopping habits and technology, and also aims to ensure that each sector of goods and services, and where items are bought, are reflected adequately in the calculations ... so some items are included to represent a sector.

Here's a few other inclusions and omissions over the last seven decades:

• Breakfast cereals first entered the basket in 1952. 
• In 1987 porridge oats were replaced by Muesli. 
• In 2001 cereal snacks appeared, changing to cereal bars in 2010,
• Tea (loose or bagged) has appeared in every basket since 1947.
• Baked beans appeared in the first basket but other canned items have come and gone, leaving just Tomatoes, and Sweetcorn with the beans.
• Corned Beef was in for decades then was dropped (I still eat it)
• Yoghurt only made it to the basket in 1974.
• Frozen oven chips replace dried mashed potatoes in 1987. 
• Ready meals of one sort or another since 1980. 
• Fish fingers were added in the 1962 basket and have remained, while other fish products have come and gone.
• The white loaf, sliced or otherwise has been a constant since the first basket in 1947.

Food as a measure of wealth, reward, or costs has a long history:

• The Stonehenge builders would have been rewarded with food including grain and beer.
• The Egyptian Pharaohs would pay their majority of pyramid builders with food and drink (meat, grain, beer and other products), not money which was too precious for general village labourers.
• Even the Romans gave every citizen of Rome (rich or poor) a weekly dole of corn to make bread with (we get the term on the dole from this), although they had a coin economy.

Most economies around the globe until very recently (the last 100 years or so) were largely barter and used no cash, so food really was the measure of wealth. Even now, well, a few decades ago ha ha, when I was doing my economics 'A Levels' back in the early 1970's, we used Mars Bars as a method of calculating the comparative  cost of living in different countries.

The Economists Friend - The Mars Bar
 - Now Devalued.

The theory was that Mars Bars were sold nearly universally in many countries, and were all at that time a standard weight and size. So you would turn an item in the UK, say a TV, in to the number of Mars bars required to buy the TV, and then compare it to the same comparative Mars bar number for a similar or identical product in another country e.g. The USA .... this gave you a rough idea of the cost in real terms in both countries. Then Mars Bar's got smaller, or larger, depending on the market, and were no longer a good comparison ... they have no doubt been replaced with something else.  

So the basket really does tell the story .....