Kevin Peachey
Cost of living
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Yoga carpets are there, while modern technology also gets a new representation
Some may use yoga rugs and virtual reality headsets to mentally escape the daily milling, but now statisticians use them to trace the cost of living.
The two articles have made their way in the basket of goods and services used by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) to calculate inflation.
The basket contains 752 articles. The ONS receives the costs of these products and services from many different retailers to offer monthly inflation figures.
This figure, currently showing prices up 3% per year, is a crucial economic measure which influences the cost of the loan – interest rates – as well as increases in benefits and pensions or to be part of the remuneration negotiations.
Changes reflect our lifestyle
The content of this huge basket of goods and services is examined each year to ensure that it gives precise reduction and weighting of our expenditure data.
But what is added or deleted each time also gives us a fascinating overview of our tastes, our trends and our changing lifestyles.
For example, Wild Rabbit was an element included in the first list of 1947. Tea bags only arrived in 1980.
This time, 23 articles were added and 15 removed from the basket.
Stephen Burgess, ONS, said: “Our basket of property inflation shows how consumer spending has evolved over the years.
“The addition of virtual reality headsets for the first time shows our appetite for emerging technology. Yoga carpets are also released as a new addition because of their increased popularity from the pandemic.”
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Small advertisements were a key source of income for local newspapers
The ONS said that spending on VR headsets should go from around 347 million pounds Sterling last year to 520 million pounds sterling by 2029.
Meanwhile, the exercise mats were not only used for yoga, but also for other types of home training.
Men’s cursors or pool sandals have also been added. The effiloche pork also substituted a gammon joint ready in the oven.
Mango is an addition to the selection of fruit, and the cushions are strengthening the under-represented area of soft living room furniture.
On the other side of the big book, the reflection of the fall in traffic and the prominence of newspapers means that advertisements in the local cloth have been deleted.
The ONS have said that anecdotal evidence suggest that many of these arguments were now found on online platforms.
Last year, Vinyl Records returned after an absence of 30 years. Air friedes have also been added, but hand disinfectants – a must -have of the codvised years – have been removed.
