Eddie Does Japan

While reflecting on the uselessness of diaries he kept in his youth, David Sedaris wrote, “I’d like to know what I ate when I was 19 years old. How much did it cost for a pound of chicken or a pack of cigarettes? …My earliest diaries tell me none of these things.” Luckily, the United States Department of Labor (USDL) measures the average cost of commonly used household goods and services and publishes this information in numeric form as the Consumer Price Index, commonly referred to as the CPI. The USDL-CPI is a pretty important number; economists use it to track inflation, companies use it to determine wage increases and historians use it to calculate how much your great-great-great-grandparents paid for, I don’t know, let’s say Alaska.

The USDL-CPI does a good job of tracking prices within the United States but it is useless when comparing the cost of goods in different countries. The anonymous correspondents at the Economist have attempted to fill this void with their Big Mac Index, which compares the cost of a McDonald’s Big Mac in about 120 different countries. While I give the Economist a giant A for effort, I’m more of an In-N-Out Burger kind of guy. As a result, I’ve decided to tackle this problem head on-by creating the Eddie Does Japan Consumer Price Index (see below). The EDJ-CPI uses the USDL-CPI as the basis to produce a list of prices for commonly used goods and services here on Tanegashima (all food prices are from my favorite local grocery store). All prices were accurate as of February 16, 2008. For the currency conversion I estimated the current exchange rate to be $1:Â¥108. Unit conversions were applied where appropriate for the benefit of readers unaccustomed to the metric system.

*Bananas and Cigarettes are listed only for curiosity’s sake. I don’t mess around with either.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 2:37 pm and is filed under Food, Japanese Miscellany, Tanegashima. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.