Any way to add a feature for inflation-adjusted price/price-per-piece?

Aanchir

Just curious. It's something I find myself looking up a lot when I read ignorant comments on sites like Facebook about how "LEGO today is too expensive", but usually if I want to get a sense of what older sets' actual prices would have been in today's money I have to look up sets individually and plug their prices into a site with an inflation calculator like http://www.wolframalpha.com/. There's no easy way to simply browse by inflation-adjusted price/PPP or even to find that info without going to another site.

Huw

Someone else asked for this and if I can find a way to add it I will do.

I guess all that's needed is a formula in the form of a function that takes a year as a parameter and a price and returns the price in today's money.

A different formula would be needed for different countries, but the US and UK would be a good start.

I've had a quick Google but haven't found anything yet. Anyone know where to look?

snowhitie

I think the easiest and most correct way for this would be to use the Consumer Price Index.

You can find these per year, for example http://www.bls.gov/cpi/data.htm has the data for the US. Most countries should have them in downloadable format. I can help you find them if you want, but will have to wait till next week.

Then you do:

Real price in historical year
x (CPI now / historical CPI)
= Price adjusted for inflation now

Would that be doable?

snowhitie

Or did I misunderstand your question and are you looking for the HTML formula out something - because I can't help with the IT part. I could help with excel and maths things though ;)

Fauch

you will probably also need a table to store your variables. inflation rate by country and by year. (though for very old sets that would mean quite a lot of calculations, or maybe you could have a function doing the calculations once every year and storing the resulting prices somewhere). Also there is the change of currency in the EU.

Huw

Programming isn't a problem one I know the formula and methodology.

MattDawson

Wouldn't the easiest thing to do is store a table of previous year's value in today's value (e.g. 1 dollar in 1990 equates to 0.86 in todays, for example) and then simply work out release price x today's value?

MattsWhat

^you would have to update the table every year which would be a faff.