ShareThisBy PAUL GRIMALDI
Friday, November 03, 2006
Beth Murphy slows down her Subaru Forrester as she reaches a tollbooth in southern New Hampshire.
She reaches into a slot in the car's console and pulls out 50 cents. She hands the two quarters to an attendant before speeding away north on the highway.
A mother of two, she's on her way to a men's clothing store to check out the sports coats. But she's not out to buy a birthday gift for her husband, Jim, an insurance-fraud investigator.
Beth Murphy, a federal employee, is out to find the sometimes-tiny price changes for the things people buy.
She is one of 450 people nationwide who work for the government as economic assistants. They gather the data that the government uses to track monthly changes in consumer prices.
It's a job that can take all the fun out of one of Americans' favorite pastimes.
"Some of us can't stand shopping," said Murphy as she tools along the highway.
Economic assistants visit about 25,000 stores, offices, photography studios and other professional-service firms to check prices and call about 50,000 landlords and tenants to gather rent and utility charges.
Each week, the economic assistants are given varying lists of goods and services to check. Consumer staples, such as milk are checked regularly across the country. Economic assistants in some parts of the country check for other items only at certain times of the year and in certain regions of the country.
The information seekers are employed by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, which compiles the Consumer Price Index _ a measure of the average change in prices over time of consumer goods and services ranging from acupuncture treatments to zucchini.
Murphy works for the department's Boston office, crisscrossing southern New Hampshire every month, mostly seeking out the same items time and again to find out what they cost. She's piled up more than 111,000 miles on her 2000 Forrester.
Rather than plunking down cash or a credit card to buy these goods and services, she enters the price data on a tablet-sized computer.
Circling from a nondescript shopping plaza in Nashua to Manchester and back, she picks out the information that will affect the budgets of millions of Americans.
Investors and economic policymakers watch the Consumer Price Index for clues to the economy's direction. The CPI helps federal, state and municipal governments and private companies determine benefit changes for employees and beneficiaries.
The federal government uses the CPI to adjust payments to 80 million Social Security beneficiaries, food-stamp recipients, military retirees and civil-service retirees. The Federal Reserve studies the index to determine whether it must adjust interest rates to moderate the economy. Private companies and individuals use the index to decide how to invest money.
To develop the current CPI, analysts employed the Consumer Expenditure Survey, collecting information during 2001 and 2002 from 10,000 households. Another 7,500 households kept detailed diaries about purchases they made of such everyday items as coffee and breath mints during a two-week period.
The survey data was used to create a "market basket" of 80,000 items Americans buy and where they buy them.
The stores fieldworkers visit volunteer to participate in the survey. The government promises not to reveal their identities.
"The responsibility is really on us to get cooperation," said Joyce Sweeney, an assistant regional commissioner in the bureau's Division of Price Programs. "We're not asking for profit margins. We're not asking for proprietary information."
Businesses large and small see participation as something of a civic duty, said Sweeney, who oversees economic assistants in New England and New York from her office in Boston.
The starting salary for economic assistants in the Boston region is about $12.50 an hour, plus mileage payments and benefits. Most of the 45 economic assistants who work out of the Boston office are college graduates.
Murphy holds an economics degree from the University of New Hampshire. She has worked for the bureau for 16 years and spent the first four years supervising other economic assistants.
She switched to the fieldworker's job after the birth of her two children, now 12 and 10, attracted by the flexible schedule and the chance to work at home.
"I can leave when my daughter gets on the bus and be home when she gets off the bus," she said.
Murphy visits 12 to 16 stores on each trip, typically concentrated within a single city or town. She drives 150 to 200 miles a week as she circles the region time and again. "I don't spend a whole lot of time getting lost," Murphy said.
She's learned a thing or two along the way, too. "I know how a muffler is fixed," she said.
