Unfortunately, this post is just speculative, but I think it would be marvelous if Wal-Mart published a price index for categories of goods and services sold in its stores--from box cereal to pickles to apples to t-shirts and tires and oil changes. I'm NOT insisting that WM must publish data as a matter of government requirement; these types of onoerous requirements give government a bad name. Nor am I asking that WM publish an endless list of prices; the world is already awash in misunderstood and flashily published data.
Instead, I think a Wal-Mart price index would be extremely important information to convey to researchers, shoppers, and opponents. It would be wonderful to compare price changes inside of Wal-Mart to other retailers and to the consumer price index. How much do Wal-Mart's productivity enhancements lower the rate of price increases inside the store versus nationwide? Are you getting the benefit of Wal-Mart's productivity (through the pressures of competition) if you shop elsewhere?
Also, one can be far more assured about the accuracy of the data from Wal-Mart's databases than from the sampling procedures employed by the BLS. Granted, this would not measure economy-wide price changes, but it would measure very accurately a large chunk of very important sales.
Perhaps a corporate-university partnership can be put into place in which researchers are granted unfettered access to the data over long-time periods, and are permitted to publish a specific index created with a publicly-available methodology. However, these researchers would have to be held to even stricter standards than those taken by the Canadian and American statistical agencies.
Wal-Mart, if you're reading, I'd be more than eager to take on this task...
Posted by Kevin on February, 3 2005 at 11:11 AM
