The Denver ounce

After the package is held still, what happened to grocery prices in Denver, and where does the public record stop?

Denver-Aurora-Lakewood food at home in August 2026 is an index of 288.763, up 1.7 percent over the year. The matching U.S. city average is up 2.2 percent. An index is not a shelf price, and it is not a King Soopers receipt.

The dollar figure BLS does publish is a national average price, already per dozen, per gallon, or per pound. One dozen grade A large eggs, one gallon of whole milk, one pound of white bread, and one pound of ground beef came to $15.25 in August 2026, U.S. city average. West urban prices exist for milk, bread, and beef. They do not exist for eggs, so that basket stays national and is never labeled Denver.

October 2025 is blank. BLS did not publish it, because of the appropriations lapse. This count does not fill the hole.

Package-size cuts are not in the Denver index, and they are not in the per-pound series either. Some average prices use one package size only. Some convert every package to a pound. Either way the published number has already left shrinkflation behind.

GAO-25-107451, covering 2019 to 2024, found product downsizing contributed less than one tenth of a percentage point of the 34.5 percent rise in the all-items CPI. In the categories it highlighted, size change contributed about 1.6 percentage points for cereal and about 3.0 percentage points for household paper products. Those figures are national. They are not redrawn here as a Denver series.

No public series measures recipe fill, serving count, or grocery fees for Denver stores. There is no sneakflation index in this project.

Denver grocery groups, August 2026, change over the year: dairy about 6.0 percent, fruits and vegetables about 5.0 percent, meats, poultry, fish, and eggs about 2.7 percent, other food at home about 1.2 percent, cereals and bakery about 0.9 percent lower, nonalcoholic beverages about 2.9 percent lower.

The index, the unit basket, and a shelf price stay three different numbers. They are not averaged into one score.

Tableau: https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/jason.pellerin/viz/denver_ounce_bls/TheDenverounce

Code and methodology: https://github.com/jasonpellerin-aisolutionist/denver-grocery-ounce

Data: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U and average prices, not seasonally adjusted. Size-change figures: GAO-25-107451.