This repository contains information about food prices to show various trends and analytics in the context of inflation. Our project explores how the average prices of selected food items have changed over time in U.S. cities using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The purpose of this project is to identify trends and patterns in food price changes over time. We focus on selected everyday food items, such as bananas, bread, eggs, ground beef, and milk, to better understand how common living costs change in an inflationary context.
This project also highlights item-level differences in price behavior. While many food items show a general upward trend over time, some items—especially eggs—show much greater short-term fluctuation. Through this project, we practice data wrangling, visualization, and reproducible reporting in R.
One interesting insight from our project is that food prices do not all change in the same way. While several selected food items show relatively steady long-term increases, egg prices appear much more volatile over shorter periods of time. This suggests that inflation is not always experienced evenly across everyday goods.
We use publicly available data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Data sources used in this project include:
- BLS Average Price dataset
- BLS Egg Price dataset
These datasets were used to examine long-term price trends and short-term variation in selected food items.
We acknowledge the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for providing the public data used in this project.
We plan to analyze changes in food prices over time and create visualizations to compare trends across different food items. Our goal is to better understand how inflation affects everyday grocery costs.
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- Aria Hooybergs, 484-757-8157, ash5932@psu.edu
- Hanna Oh, 814-753-0390, hzo5090@psu.edu
- Aryan Deshmukh, 480-228-1139, acd5922@psu.edu