When did you last eat a whole rotisserie chicken or buy loose cut ham from a butcher? Not as recently as you bought music on vinyl I bet. Always on the money, the UK’s Office for National Statistics has joined the vinyl party, and will be monitoring prices from February incorporating vinyl records into the consumer price index for the first time since 1992.
Inflation has been a staple of headlines over the past couple of years, blamed by many in the UK on the double whammy of Brexit and COVID. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for some time, you’ve almost certainly seen headlines screaming that inflation is “out of control” or “soaring” or “spiralling”.
The Consumer Price Index - the UK’s primary measure of inflation - is a complex collection of goods and services, often referred to as the “basket of goods and services”, used to track inflation.
“The virtual basket contains over 700 carefully selected items representative of the goods and services that consumers typically spend their money on”, says the Office for National Statistics. That basket of goods is updated each year following careful consideration by a team of economists and statisticians working for the ONS to give - in the words of Matt Corder, deputy boffin in charge of prices - “a fascinating snapshot of consumer spending”.
The most recent update pushed out today sees the return - for the first time since 1992 - of vinyl records.
A quick flick through the list of things removed is like a little horror story of despair all of its own: hand sanitiser gel, sofa beds, rotisserie chickens, loose cooked ham, popcorn, lattes. Meanwhile, the things added are like a ready-made trip to Margate: wild bird seed, rice cakes, gluten free bread, women’s socks, air fryers and vinyl.
What if we’ve been measuring the wrong things all this time? Maybe inflation isn’t out of control at all and we just needed to pay closer attention to air fryers, bird seed and physical music formats.
“The return of vinyl records shows how cultural revivals can affect our spending”, says Corder, displaying the levels of restraint typical for government statisticians. Kim Bayley, CEO of ERA, the trade group for entertainment retailers, is happy to push things a little further. It’s “an incredible milestone” she says, “marking the return to the mainstream of a format most people – including the music industry – had given up on”.
The BPI’s Jo Twist joins the celebration, saying, “It’s good to see the ONS once again including vinyl LPs in its measure of what people are buying around the UK”, going on to add, “It feels an entirely natural that vinyl should once more be seen as a popular indicator of how people are choosing to spend their hard earned money. CDs may not be far behind!” Steady on, Jo.
Neither - somewhat disappointingly - had anything to say about air fryers. A third of households in the UK apparently own an air fryer, and stats published by plastics-and-gadgets purveyor Lakeland in September 2023 said that air fryer sales had shot up 1175% year on year.
Though they also claimed that “heated textiles” - throws and ponchos that you plug in and wear - were also soaring in popularity, so you might want to take their predictions with a pinch of salt. Or at least understand that what appeals to Lakeland shoppers may not represent the mainstream. Though, to be fair, that’s what they were saying about vinyl a few years ago too.
An Allied Market Research report says that the global market for air fryers might reach $1.9 billion by 2032 with a compound annual growth rate of 6.5% between now and then. That’s all very well, but how many times a year are you going to buy an air fryer, and how often does your favourite artist release a limited edition boxset double basket smart fryer?
While vinyl sales haven’t increased quite as fast as air fryers, we can only hope. Recent stats published by ERA show that vinyl LP sales increased 17.8% year on year by value in 2023, and 11.8% by units sold. If we all pull together and try for a 1175% increase by this time next year we’d be shifting 76 million vinyl LPs, compared to this year’s 6.5 million. That would take UK vinyl LP sales to over £2 billion in the UK alone, which, frankly, makes the global potential of air fryers look fairly insignificant.
For those eager to see the impact of the new choices, they’ve already been rolled into February’s inflation data. That will come out on 20 Mar. Like most people, we can barely contain our excitement.
