ContextQMD
Back to Worldmonitor

Consumer Prices

docs/panels/consumer-prices.mdx

2.10.03.6 KB
Original Source

The Consumer Prices panel is the retail-inflation and basket-pricing surface for the dashboard. It tracks actual shelf prices at the market (country) level, broken down by category and retailer, and exposes source freshness so a reader can see when the underlying scrapes last ran.

What the panel shows

Five tabs under a market + basket selector and a time-range control:

TabWhat it answers
OverviewCurrent basket level, period-over-period change, and a sparkline across the selected range.
CategoriesCategory-level snapshot (food, beverages, household, essentials, etc.) with period deltas.
MoversTop risers and top fallers across the basket for the selected window — the items driving the overall change.
SpreadRetailer-level price spread on a fixed essentials basket — which retailer is cheapest, which is most expensive, and the gap.
HealthData-source freshness — when each upstream scrape last completed, with a clear indicator if data is stale.

Panel-level controls:

  • Market bar — a button per supported market (default AE; the full list comes from MARKETS in src/services/consumer-prices). Selecting a market implicitly sets the basket to that market's essentials-<code> variant (or the default basket when the all aggregate view is active) — there is no separate basket picker.
  • Range bar — 7d, 30d, or 90d.
  • Category filter — click a category row on the Categories tab to scope the Movers tab to that category. A clear-filter affordance resets it.

Settings persist across sessions in localStorage under wm-consumer-prices-v1.

Panel id is consumer-prices; canonical component is src/components/ConsumerPricesPanel.ts.

How you reach it

  • Cmd+K: type prices or consumer.
  • Availability by variant: enabled by default in the finance and commodity variants. Registered but disabled (opt-in) in the full/geopolitical variant. Not registered in the tech or happy variants. Source: FINANCE_PANELS, COMMODITY_PANELS, FULL_PANELS in src/config/panels.ts.

Data sources

Five tab RPCs plus one sparkline RPC back the panel:

SurfaceRPC
OverviewGET /api/consumer-prices/v1/get-consumer-price-overview
Overview sparklineGET /api/consumer-prices/v1/get-consumer-price-basket-series
CategoriesGET /api/consumer-prices/v1/list-consumer-price-categories
MoversGET /api/consumer-prices/v1/list-consumer-price-movers
SpreadGET /api/consumer-prices/v1/list-retailer-price-spreads
HealthGET /api/consumer-prices/v1/get-consumer-price-freshness

Upstream data is scraped from retailer price feeds by the companion consumer-prices-core service and published as Redis snapshots per market and basket.

Refresh cadence

The underlying seeders run roughly once per day per market+basket combination. The Consumer Prices keys in api/health.js allow up to 25 hours (maxStaleMin: 1500) before the health surface escalates a warning, which gives the seeder a 1-hour grace window on top of the daily cadence.

The Health tab inside the panel shows the per-source fetched-at timestamps so you can see staleness directly rather than relying on global health flags.

Tier & gating

Consumer Prices is free. The panel is registered without a premium flag in src/config/panels.ts, so anyone — including unauthenticated readers — can see it on variants where it is enabled.

API reference