Consumer Price Index For All Urban Consumers (CPI-U)

Every month, the Department of Labor releases a new monthly report that most Americans don’t know how to read. But Labor Department analysts keep churning them out from the bowels of a Washington building, hoping and wishing that their parents will hang the Excel files on refrigerators with a gold star and tell their neighbors proudly: “My son works for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.” To which the first neighbor just says, “Nerd.” And the second neighbor replies: “What the heck is the Bureau of Labor Statistics?”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is in charge of all the government publications and data around most major economic data that you read about each month. Unemployment, consumer prices, inflation, and labor productivity are just a few examples.

One of the things that they produce is the Consumer Price Index For All Urban Consumers (CPI-U).

Because the vast majority of Americans live in dense population centers like cities and suburbs, focusing on those areas makes it more sensible to measure prices of different goods. So they track expenditures for food, energy, clothes, cars, transportation, and every other type of purchase that many Americans make on a day-to-day basis. They track month-to-month price changes, and year-over-year changes.

They even track the change in alcohol costs...which is how the BLS truly justifies its existence.