The measurement of retail output and the retail revolution

The Measurement of Retail Output and the Retail Revolution The computerization of retailing has made price dispersion a norm in the United States, so that any given list price or transactions price is an increasingly imperfect measure of a product’s resource cost. As a consequence, measuring the real output of retailers has become increasingly difficult. Food retailing is used as a case study to examine data problems in retail productivity measurement. Crude direct measures of grocery store output suggest that the CPI for food-at-home may have been overstated by 1.4 percentage points annually from 1978 to 1996. Address editorial correspondence to: Leonard I. Nakamura Research Department Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia 10 Independence Mall Philadelphia, PA 19106 215-574-3804 (office) 215-574-4364 (fax) nakamura@frbphil.org (email) NOTE: This paper makes references to figures not available with this electronic version. If you’d like a hard copy of this paper, please call the Philadelphia Fed’s Publications Desk at 215574-6428 or send an email to L is.Newell@phil.frb.org. The Measurement of Retail Output and the Retail Revolution

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