Given the fact that Amazon can deliver a product to my door in less than 24 hours, and that we can confidently model the paths of storms over the oceans, why can't we do better with collecting real data about prices?
To calculate CPI inflation, BLS teams collect approximately 90,000 price quotes every month covering 200 different item categories, and there are several hundred field collectors active across 75 urban areas.When data is not available, BLS staff typically develop estimates for approximately 10% of the cells in the CPI calculation. However, the share of data in the CPI that is estimated has increased significantly in recent months and is now above 30%, see chart below.
In other words, a rising share of prices going into the CPI at the moment are guesses based on other data collections in the CPI.