...number of uses. (You thought I was going for a cheap laugh, didn't you.)
Continued after the orange knitted toilet paper cozy below.
Got a free pdf reader? If so, you may find this informative. If you can figure out what it's saying. The link is an early US Government publication about the Chained CPI. Heavy on abstract concepts and math, light-weight when it comes to concrete examples. In fact, the only concretes I found on a quick scan of the document were in one parenthetical phrase in one paragraph:
...(e.g., a leather band watch versus a stainless steel band watch or whole wheat bread versus white bread) and inter-item, that is across elementary items (e.g., theater admission versus video rental or beer versus wine).
Watch bands? How quaint. Do lots of people still wear those? And video rentals? The large space occupied by the Blockbuster store in my small town has been vacant for several years now. Whole wheat bread vs white? Haven't bought a loaf of bread in quite some time. But I do know that the price of white flour - when it's on sale - for making tortillas is about half that of whole wheat flour - which is hardly ever on sale. And neither is ever on sale at the small nearby market. So that means putting on my empty backpack and walking a couple of miles to the A&P and then walking back with a heavy - but not as full as I'd like it to be - loaded backpack.
Beer versus wine? I know a little bit about that. But again, the cheapest beer at the nearby liquor store is Pabst Blue Ribbon. While the other liquor store in town, with a somewhat wider selection of cheap beers, is a mile or so beyond the A&P. And if you think flour is heavy, imagine trudging three miles with a case of Schaefer's "... the one beer to have when you're having more than one..." pressing into the small of the back. As for wine, the nearby store had a three-liter box of Inglenook Merlot for about $12 bucks, but recently raised the price to about $15 bucks. ($14.97 - including tax - to be specific.)
Now, to justify the title, a little bit about cheap toilet paper.
The re-cycled stuff (from office waste, silly, not recycled toilet paper - at least I don't think so) costs about as much as the "thousand sheet" brand. A&P's generic is sometimes a little cheaper, but not by much. Then there's WalMart.
The 'local' Walmart is about a 15 mile hike from me. In another county. I have not attempted that yet, because my shoes aren't up to it, for one thing, and because its a long way. But when I used to have a car (before it stopped running - hint: a 'flood car' is hard to spot until several years after it leaves the used car lot) I tried a roll of the WalMart cheap single-sheet brand. Instead of being able to fold three sheets for a wipe, which the "thousand sheet" brand, the re-cycled brand, and the A&P generic brand all handled with ease, the WalMart brand required (if I recall) a fold of five sheets. Otherwise, my finger would poke through. The phrase that came to this writer's mind was, "It's not how many sheets per role that matters, it's how many..." (the completion of that phrase is left as an exercise for the reader).
Sorry to have grossed anybody out, but that's the sort of thing that the Chained CPI means to me. I suppose it's nice (for consumers, at least) that foreign factories can produce a DVD player that retails for $39.75 instead of $39.95. But how many DVD players does one need. And if video games can be sold for $59 instead of $60, that doesn't really benefit me. Solitaire comes at no additional charge with the OS I'm using. The 'market basket' as it applies to a single mother, for example, has little to do with the 'market basket' for a senior citizen (unless the prices of Huggies and Depends (which, thank Heavens, I don't need yet) have some sort of correlation).
The CPI subset used to calculate the COLA for Social Security already leaves out 'volatile' luxuries such as food. Can you imagine what a Chained CPI will mean. To real people.
And for those of you fond of not-quite-as-real people, please check out my free ongoing serialized novel, Sherlock Holmes In Space -- The Knower which usually publishes here on dkos at 8 PM Eastern on Tuesday. Tonight's chapter will be shorter than usual, because I felt a need to say what this TP diary attempts to say.