ABSTRACT
The wholesale prices of the commodities are important to many producers and consumers and they are a major influence in the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The history of retail price changes since the end of the war is one of a gradually declining rate of increase, with alternating periods of rapid and less than rapid rises. Normally the difference between the wholesale price of a commodity and the retail price of the same article will include costs of transport, insurance, handling, storage and packaging together with the profit margin of the retailer. The left hand distribution has no central tendency; it might be misleading to quote the arithmetic mean as the measure of the average value. The indexes are useful as indicators of trends in commodity prices, but the method of calculation has one defect: it gives equal importance to each commodity.
