Inflation is hitting the 'budget' brands way harder than the fancy stuff, even though they're on the same shelf.
March 20, 2026
Original Paper
Same aisle, different price increases: Rethinking food CPI for income-sensitive groups
SSRN · 6441739
The Takeaway
Commonly called 'cheapflation,' this study shows that official inflation rates understate the pain for the poor. Lower-priced 'budget' brands consistently saw steeper price hikes than luxury counterparts, meaning the most vulnerable households face a much higher cost-of-living increase than the general population even when buying the same types of food.
From the abstract
This paper examines the distributional biases inherent in aggregate price indices. We leverage high-frequency web-scraped data from a major South African retailer to construct an alternative Food and Non-Alcoholic Beverage (NAB) Consumer Price Index (CPI). While official indices typically rely on average prices across broad categories, this paper exploits product-level granularity to observe price dynamics across different brand tiers. We find that the scraped CPI not only tracks the official se