2024 Twelve Days of Christmas Costs -- Data Update
Is there a fix? "Core" Christmas Index? Total Christmas Index?
I’ve looked at PNC’s “Christmas Price Index” a few times before:
In 2017, I noted that PNC’s Index solely added up the cost on the 12th day of Christmas. They have since both given the index as that number (adding the gifts from the 12th day) and the total cost index (adding the gifts mentioned from all twelve days, cumulatively. See the video at the end of this post.)
In 2023, I noticed some weirdness between the stated historical index and the individual prices.
This is what I wrote:
The red line is the PNC Christmas Price Index. Just ignore 2020. I don’t want to litigate what they did with the 2020 numbers (bah, humbug).
But, what the heck is going on 2010 - 2013? The sum of the components and the index don’t match at all! (I may email them and ask them — what the heck?)
They provide the data that supposedly are behind the index, year-by-year, and the sums are very close, except for those specific years as you can see in that graph.
The main point of this annual exercise is to give something “fun” for kids to do in math classes to learn about inflation and economics.
Maybe they’ll learn something about audit now, too.
Let’s get to the 2024 update!
PNC Christmas Price Index By Component, 1984 - 2024
These are the nominal prices, as the point of the PNC Price Index is partly an educational exercise to give to the kiddies right before holiday break to do something nominally mathematical, learn about inflation, yadda yadda.
(It’s mainly about marketing, and getting the PNC name in local news, but that’s neither here nor there.)
There is a hook for everybody, because they make the “maids” item about minimum wage. Good luck getting a real milkmaid for minimum wage in 2024 USA.
Most of the other items seem to be based on real prices, and they’ve even broken out their price table by “traditional” and “internet”, which appears to include shipping prices for the goods.
The table is in their press release:
You’ll notice that the table has multiple items with no price change since 2023. They’re looking at list retail prices here, not as commodities. They’re not even shopping for bargains!
A good haggler could do better than that, I bet.
You can see the “internet” prices are higher than the “traditional”, which tells me all sorts of charges/fees/shipping are involved.
As for the issue with the non-matching index & prices last year — they just had wrong numbers up for 2010-2013 for the items. That’s it. Why the wrong numbers were there last year? I have no idea. They did get fixed this year. Maybe somebody else also noticed. I’m not even checking if somebody emailed them (maybe that somebody was me.)
PNC TOTAL Christmas Price Index By Component, 1984 - 2024
In this version of the index, you have to go through ALL twelve days, not just the 12th day. So the partridge in a pair tree is given twelve times (on all 12 days), the 2 turtledoves are given eleven times (for a total of 22 doves), 3 french hens are given ten times (for 30 hens), and so on.
The costs really mount up.
So instead of a Christmas Cost Index of about $50K (or $49,263.47, as reported by PNC, a 5.4% increase over 2023), you get a TOTAL Christmas Cost Index topping $200K. Indeed, it exceeded $200K in 2023.
PNC also came up with a “core” index, where they removed the single most expensive item from the index: the 7 swans a-swimming. Originally, they said they removed it due to volatility, except that those swans have been sitting at a $13,125 per day cost since 2012. It’s not about volatility.
That said, there are enough different sorts of elements in this index, and kids (or college students) can source their own prices, it gives some great classroom discussion. Also, for the past couple years, I have had the topic of data quality and audit, given the components didn’t add up for the years 2010-2013.
There there is the issue with what they did with 2020….
But I’m not going to argue that now.
Happy 2nd Day of Christmas!
