“Americans are paying more for worse stuff, study finds”
February 17, 2022
“Measured by consumer prices, U.S. inflation is the highest in 40 years. Look at what Americans are actually getting for their money and the rate may be even higher, according to researchers at the University of Michigan.
The academics publish a quarterly American Customer Satisfaction Index, which seeks to measure how happy consumers are with the goods and services they spend on. The latest edition, released earlier this week, found that there’s been a 5.2 per cent decline in quality since 2018, with the bulk of it coming in the pandemic years…
The Michigan researchers attempt to measure quality across all the industries they track. Their latest findings “suggest that actual annualized inflation is probably about 10 per cent” if prices were “fully adjusted for quality decline,” the report says. The January CPI showed consumer prices rose 7.5 per cent from a year ago…”
https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/americans-are-paying-more-for-worse-stuff-study-finds-1.1724841