Eleven named items, one of each, in the sizes you buy them · October 2019 against August 2026 · updated monthly
In October 2019 these eleven items cost $26.77. In August 2026 the same eleven cost $42.09 — $15.32 more, or +57.2%. Nothing on the list changed.
Same eleven items, same sizes, priced in two single months, October 2019 and August 2026. Every price is a published BLS average price series, named in the right-hand column, so you can pull any of them yourself. What the list is, and is not →
THE AFFORDABILITY PROBLEM
2019
OCTOBER 2019
TOTAL$26.77
1 THERM = 100,000 BTU ~ 100 CU FT · BLS AVERAGE PRICE DATA
PRICES ROUNDED TO THE CENT. THE TOTAL IS NOT.
THE AFFORDABILITY PROBLEM
TODAY
AUGUST 2026
TOTAL$42.09
1 THERM = 100,000 BTU ~ 100 CU FT · BLS AVERAGE PRICE DATA
PRICES ROUNDED TO THE CENT. THE TOTAL IS NOT.
The same two slips the film opens on, built from today's data. Every line and both totals are below, with the series under each.
Film two · 5:27
The same eleven grocery and energy items, priced twice: October 2019 and today. Why prices that rose have not come back down, and what does bring a price down.
Eleven BLS average price series via FRED · one of each, unweighted, not adjusted for anything · monthly, October 2019 to August 2026. The line starts in October 2019 because coffee (APU0000717311) was suspended by BLS from September 2018 until then. It breaks at October 2025, which does not exist. The federal shutdown stopped BLS collection that month, the CPI release was cancelled, and BLS has said the data will not be collected retroactively — so the gap is permanent. It is the first missing month in a series published continuously since January 1921. These prices are built from the same collection, which is why ten of the eleven stop; gasoline survives because its average price is calculated from an outside weekly source. (Richmond Fed, 16 December 2025.) Nothing is drawn across a month nobody published. The change quoted above is between those two single months, the same two the slips and the table use.
Both columns are single months: October 2019, the start line for every figure in film two, and August 2026, the latest month BLS has published for all eleven. Sorted by how much each line added in dollars. Why single months →
| Item | Unit | Oct 2019 | Aug 2026 | Change | Series |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| coffee | lb | $4.17 | $9.30 | +123% | APU0000717311 |
| ground beef | lb | $3.84 | $6.92 | +80% | APU0000703112 |
| gasoline | gallon | $2.67 | $4.20 | +57% | APU000074714 |
| chicken breast | lb | $2.95 | $4.17 | +42% | APU0000FF1101 |
| milk | gallon | $3.12 | $4.23 | +36% | APU0000709112 |
| eggs | dozen | $1.28 | $2.27 | +77% | APU0000708111 |
| bacon | lb | $5.65 | $6.61 | +17% | APU0000704111 |
| natural gas | therm | $1.04 | $1.71 | +65% | APU000072620 |
| bread | lb | $1.32 | $1.82 | +38% | APU0000702111 |
| bananas | lb | $0.573 | $0.652 | +14% | APU0000711211 |
| electricity | kWh | $0.136 | $0.196 | +44% | APU000072610 |
| The eleven | one of each | $26.77 | $42.09 | +57.2% | sum |
In July 2026 the eleven came to $41.91. In August they came to $42.09 — +0.4% in one month.
Gasoline moved most. It went from $4.094 a gallon to $4.200 — up 11 cents. One month is not a trend, and one line can move a lot while the total barely does. The chart above is what shows whether a month is the start of something or noise.
These are retail prices — what people actually paid — so they lag the commodity markets that feed them. Gasoline follows crude by weeks. Piped gas and electricity are tariffs and can take a quarter or more to pass anything through, if they pass it at all. A move in futures today is not in this table and should not be.
Eleven items, one of each, at the sizes BLS publishes: a pound, a gallon, a dozen, a kilowatt-hour, a therm. A therm is 100,000 BTU — roughly an hour of a furnace running flat out, and the one unit on this list nobody meets on a label.
The eleven are summed unweighted, one unit apiece. That is deliberate, and it is also the list’s limit: a dozen eggs is a weekly-ish purchase, a kilowatt-hour is a rounding error on a bill, and a therm is an hour of heat. Scaling this to a weekly shop would need quantities nobody publishes. So the list is not scaled — it is held still and priced twice, which is the only honest thing to do with it.
An index is an argument about a composite. A price is a fact you can check at a shop. Nothing on this page is adjusted for inflation, deflated, seasonally adjusted or reweighted. These are the published average prices, added up.
Both columns are single months, as they are in film two. October 2019 is the film’s start line for everything it draws — prices, money, pay and rent — because it is the last stretch before the pandemic and the first month all eleven series exist together: BLS suspended the coffee series from September 2018 to September 2019.
A single month is noisier than a year’s average. One month of egg prices can be mostly avian flu. That is the cost of this basis, and the chart above is the answer to it: every month in between is drawn, so a spike at either end shows as a spike rather than hiding inside a total.
Coffee starts near its low. October 2019 coffee was $4.17 a pound. The full years either side averaged $4.45 (2017) and $4.43 (2020), so coffee’s change from October 2019 is larger than it would be from a normal year. It is said here rather than left for someone to find. More in Corrections →
Until 29 September 2026 this page compared annual averages instead. What changed →
BLS publishes these prices to the tenth of a cent. The table shows them that way under a dollar; the slips round every line to the cent, as a paper receipt would. The total is the exact sum of the published prices, rounded once, half up, to the cent — the same rounding the film uses. So adding the eleven printed lines on a slip can land a cent away from its total, and the total is the correct one. The slip’s fine print says so.
Nudging a printed price so the column adds up would make the page tidier and wrong. This note is the alternative.
BLS restates recent months occasionally. Figures are quoted as published and every one is dated. Where a restatement is large enough to change a claim, it goes in Corrections with both values and the date.
All eleven are BLS Average Price Data, US city average, not seasonally adjusted, via FRED. The series ID is in the table above; append it to fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ to pull it yourself.
This page compared the 2019 annual average with the 2026 average so far: $26.70 against $41.96 for January to August, +57.2%. Film two, published today, compares October 2019 with the latest month: $26.77 against $42.09 for August, also +57.2%.
Neither set of figures was wrong; they measured different things. But a page and a film that print different totals for the same eleven items invite the question of which one is right, so there is now one measurement. The items, sizes and sources have not changed. The slips, the table, the chart and the film now show the same two months.
This page said both columns were annual averages. For ten of the eleven that is right. For coffee it was the average of October, November and December 2019 only: BLS suspended APU0000717311 from September 2018 to September 2019, so those three months are all that exists.
The figure has not changed and is not wrong. $4.14 is what those three months average, and anyone pulling the series gets the same number — it is reproducible and it is dated. What was wrong was the sentence describing how it was built, which has been corrected above and beside the table.
It does flatter the comparison, and that is worth saying plainly. Coffee bottomed out in exactly the quarter we can see. The full years either side average $4.45 (2017) and $4.43 (2020). Measured from a normal year, coffee would read about +114% rather than the +129% printed above, and the eleven together about +55% rather than +57%. The figure stays as published, because changing a baseline to one BLS did not publish would be a worse fault than an awkward one it did — but you should know which way it leans before you quote it.
This correction was made under the old annual-average basis. The point still stands under the new one: October 2019 is one of the three months that exist, and it sits near coffee’s low. See Method.
Found an error? Say so and cite the series. Corrections appear here with what was wrong, what it is now, and the date. Nothing gets quietly edited.