WSJ Inflation Tracker Helps You Budget for Shopping
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Here's your Money Briefing for Friday, July 15th. I'm J.R. Whelan for The Wall Street Journal. Inflation has soared 9.1% over the past year, wreaking havoc on many Americans' household budgets. And trying to keep up with constantly changing prices on everything from food to gas to new shoes for the kids can be a headache all on its own. Well, the WSJ has a new interactive tool to simplify that process by keeping track of thousands of products and prices.
So the government, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, publishes new inflation numbers once a month. This tool will update along with those numbers. When the new numbers are out, the numbers on this page change. So it's a good place to come back to to compare where things have been and where are they now.
Coming up, the WSJ's Brian Witten will tell us more about how the new graphic tracks prices and why it can be a useful tool even when inflation comes back down. That's after the break.
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How does inflation affect everyday household budgets right now?
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One thing's for sure, prices are going up by a lot. What's not so clear is how the price for any individual item on your shopping list is changing. Well, there's a new inflation tracking tool from the Wall Street Journal that'll crunch the numbers for you to help you better plan your household budget. Brian Witten is part of our consumer technology team and is part of the group that created the inflation tracker, and he joins us now. Hey, Brian, thanks for taking the time to chat.
Yeah, happy to do it.
So, Brian, why did you and the team at the WSJ build this tool?
Inflation is everywhere you look. It's impossible to avoid it. So we thought that we'd put something together that would help people understand it a bit more. Every month, it's a big number that comes out, but there's really so much more to it. And so we wanted to put something together that would help people understand the different aspects, what goes into it. give people at the same time a big picture look while also breaking it down into specific components that would be easier to relate to.
Yeah, let's talk about those features and how the tracker works. What can people learn from it?
At the top, we give people something of a heat map of inflation. It's a big picture overview, so you can get a sense of prices cooling or prices rising. When you land there, the first thing you see is a big grid of colored squares. And the squares represent specific products and items and categories that are tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And you can see when you run your mouse over each of the squares, what the price changes for that item since the same time last year. And they're colored. The orange squares mean prices have increased. Blue squares mean prices have decreased. As you can imagine, there's a lot of orange squares this month.
Yeah, a lot of orange indeed. So give us an example of how people can track the prices of things that they buy.
Yeah, so we scroll down a bit and you'll see that we've broken out a bunch of categories that make up products that Americans will typically buy.
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