Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 31, 1995 TAG: 9506010017
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
When the state asked the news outlets and other Market Basket users to pay for the service, 55 said it was useful, but they wouldn't fork over money for it. Another 25 said they weren't using the survey at all.
"Only five organizations wanted to pay," said Joseph Chu, who is responsible for the food price report along with other duties in the Office of International Marketing of the state Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services.
And five wasn't enough. As of June 30, the monthly checks on 40 food items at grocery stores in Roanoke, Richmond, Norfolk and Northern Virginia will stop. How the survey came to end is a micro look at what's happening in a world gone ga-ga for job cutting.
Chu was hired four years ago to handle statistics and everything else about the livestock market in Virginia, which means he was to keep up with pigs and cattle and what they mean in the state's domestic and export business.
Then the person who had similar responsibilities for poultry left, and Chu added chickens to his job. Next, the crop expert was gone, and Chu harvested crop statistics. Then he became editor of the Market Basket report.
Under Allen's dictates that state government needed to look at what services could be discontinued, Market Basket looked like a good candidate for review. Thus came the survey of users, their answers, and the decision to quit.
The loss of the Virginia survey won't mean the end to scrutinizing food prices, because the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics still has its figures that chart inflation at the grocery store. A state version probably is not so important anyway, because food prices don't vary drastically from one area of the country to another.
Grocery prices blip up and down for a variety of reasons, including weather, worker strikes and simple demand by shoppers. May's high lettuce and celery prices surely reflect the loss of crops during flooding in California several months ago.
But why is May's $78.88 total $2.61 lower than April's or $2.50 higher than May a year ago? Maybe pork costs soared or round steak plummeted, or ice cream increased because sugar was in short supply.
The Virginia survey was designed to measure the change in the retail cost of a fixed quantity of foods. The cost of the Market Basket is derived by multiplying the average retail price of each item by the quantity and totaling the entire group.
The Market Basket combines 40 of the 71 items priced during the same period of time each month. It doesn't represent the cost of food for a family or the change in food prices, but measures the increase or decrease in the total cost of commodities in the survey.
You can't make any assumptions about inflation from the Virginia figures, but you can from those in the Food at Home survey compiled by the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
The bureau has been surveying prices for 60 years and will continue. The first survey's prices weren't available, but here are some from the January 1951 report. For comparison, the 1995 price is in parentheses:
Five pounds of flour, 49 cents ($1.23); pound of pork chops, 72 cents ($3.70); loaf of white bread, 14 cents ($1.29); dozen eggs, 66 cents (85 cents); 5 pounds of sugar, 51 cents ($2.09); pound of apples, 11 cents (98 cents).
The facts are that food prices have gone up an average of 401 percent since 1951, according to the Department of Labor. It's enough to make you diet, right?
You can contact Kelly at (703) 981-3393, or by writing her at P.O. Box 2491, Roanoke, 24010, or by e-mail at sandrakinfi.net
by CNB