There needs to be an index that reflects what people really need and the closest I’ve found is the ALICE index: https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
My household does care if basic games and toys are cheaper or more expensive; we have kids and want to get some amount of stuff for them. If the price changes we will get more or less of those things since our budget for them is limited. I probably won't fall into abject poverty if some non essential things go up in price, but I also will be buying less which has both personal and broader economic impacts.
The game of Clue, and other games/toys, are in basket of goods because on average Americans spend some portion of their income per surveys:
* https://www.bls.gov/respondents/cpi/
The CPI published (and in headlines) isn't about your personal spending, but the spending on average spread over millions of people/households. The CPI is a model of reality, and so pointing to a particular instantiation of consumer will not match exactly:
Alice pulls medians from other surveys (so it uses what I assume to be CPI food and CPI housing data, though they may also use other things), and then includes childcare and healthcare costs with some (imo) pretty painful assumptions, and then tacks on a random 10% "misc" category. It does a good job of creating a very high estimate of costs. As one example, I looked at the housing cost for an suburb I'm familiar with, and it lists the housing cost for a single individual as nearly $1800, you can pretty easily find 1BR apartments for 1-1.2K in that area, and utilities aren't going to run $600/mo, and you can pretty easily go cheaper.
And then again after doing that it tacks on a "misc" 10% budget item. I wouldn't call it a good estimate of "what people really need" and also it consumes the basket of goods, it doesn't compare to it.
There's value in the index you described as well, but IMO it doesn't make sense to use it as the basis for the overall economy.
1/3 of the households make less than $50k. Mean survival budget is $35k-40k. After taxes, if a third of the population can barely meet a survival budget, an index like this needs to be part of the overall economy.
And the point of the ALICE index is exactly to address what you are pointing out. When wages, social security etc. were increasing proportionally to the essential goods, it made sense to have the CPI include other goods and services, allowing policy makers to use it as a basis for policy directions. However, when essentials become expensive faster than non essentials, it creates a problem for policy makers. It explains the “vibeflation” where policy makers were pushing back hard on economic struggles that most people are feeling by pointing to CPI numbers that show a 2-3% inflation, meanwhile people are struggling and dipping into savings to make things work.
We need to have both.
Not even counting the number of households who are at credit card and other debt limits at close to 30% interest. Trump has given some lip service to trying to get this down to 10%, but it'll really take congress to make anything happen that has a chance of sticking.
A lot of people are very underwater.
It means increasingly focusing on the spending of the rich, because the population is increasingly richer. Proportion of families making more that 150k (in 2024 dollars) has gone from 5% in 1967 to 33% in 2024, while both middle class (50k-150k) and poor (<50k) have decreased. [1]
[1] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!dtoi!,f_auto,q_auto:...
No single metric tells the whole story, and by taking them in isolation it’s quite easy to lose the forest for the trees.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/economy/consumers/us-economy-strength-ri...
The ideal number of toys is non-zero, but my experience suggests that it is pretty low.
I would hesitate to include the retail prices for these kinds of goods to a CPI type metric because the price are incredibly flexible.
How many toys do you have?
Mostly sarcastic, but I don't think it's a hot take to realize that the curtain has shifted substantially over the decades in terms of how to raise a child.