Food · Single item chart

Coffee.

100% ground roast · per pound · US city average · all available data

Coffee vs. official inflation, 1967–2025

Indexed: 1980 = 100 · Three lines, three measures of inflation: what consumers actually paid (retail), the BLS CPI subindex for this category, and overall CPI-U All Items

Coffee, retail price (BLS APU0000717311, 1980+) Coffee, CPI subindex (BLS, 1967+) CPI-U All Items (BLS, 1947+)

Reading the chart. Coffee is a curious case. Over the full 1980-2025 window it ran 0.66x as fast as CPI (2.60x vs 3.91x) — a real-terms decline. But within the recent 2018-2025 window it ran 1.48x faster than CPI (1.90x vs 1.28x), driven by a sharp climbing trajectory starting in 2022 as Brazilian harvest failures, global shipping disruptions, and arabica supply shortages hit retail prices. The chart shows both stories.