Food · Single item chart

Flour.

White all-purpose · per pound · US city average · all available data

Flour vs. official inflation, 1978–2025

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

Flour, retail price (BLS APU0000701111, 1980+) Flour & flour mixes, CPI subindex (BLS, 1978+) CPI-U All Items (BLS, 1947+)

Reading the chart. Flour shows one of the largest methodological drifts in the Reality Index basket. The retail dollar series grew 2.67x from 1980 to 2025 — slower than CPI's 3.91x. But the BLS CPI subindex for 'Flour and prepared flour mixes' grew 4.32x — 62% faster than the retail flour itself. The gap reflects the subindex's broader basket: it includes prepared flour mixes (cake mixes, pancake mixes, baking blends) that carry higher per-pound prices and have inflated faster than plain flour. The two lines on this chart show how broadly BLS defines a category vs. what a household actually paid for a bag of all-purpose flour.