Re-introducing our Supply Chain Indexes of Consumer Inflationary Pressures (SCICIP)

What are the SCICIP Indexes?

The Supply Chain Indexes of Consumer Inflation Pressures (SCICIP) were first introduced in 2022 as a novel technique for tracking the impacts of supply chain disruptions and price pressures on consumer purchasing behavior. The indexes are unique from other economic indicators in their ability to capture the consumer experience of supply and price dynamics, and offer insight into how inflation impacts spending. Government data and other measures can capture the “what” in terms of how supply availability, prices and spending levels are changing, but Morning Consult’s indexes can shed light on the “why” behind these shifts. 

The six SCICIP indexes each track one of three major themes: supply, price and demand. The supply-side indexes seek to gauge how consumers experience changes in supply chain pressures, complementing business-side indicators such as the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s Global Supply Chain Pressure Index (GSCPI). The Price Surprise index is a counterpart to government inflation measures, tracking the extent to which consumers notice price increases across various categories. Finally, the demand side indicators track how consumers alter their purchasing behavior in response to price changes. 

The Price Surprise, Price Sensitivity, Trading Down (formerly “Substitutability”) and Unavailability indexes are available for 21 different product and service categories, covering most of the typical consumer purchasing basket. Purchasing Difficulty and Delivery Delays indexes offer a slightly more limited subset of these same categories. The topline indexes are compiled using a weighted average of category-level components, with the relative importance of each component derived from its weight in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ consumer price index. 

The index calculations listed below are based on a question framework tracking the outcomes of purchases considered in the past month, including price-related details of the purchase experience and the motivation behind purchases that were not completed. Shares of respondents selecting various response options serve as the components underlying each index.

2025 Methodology Updates: 

Re-Basing All Indexes to a Common Base Period

As of July 2025, all top-line indexes are rebased to a common base period of September 2024, with a base value of zero. This date was selected because, since the indexes’ inception in 2022, this month reflects the closest we have come to “normal” inflation conditions: Top-line inflation was 2.1% according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation, the personal consumption expenditures price index. Further reinforcing the selection of this base period for the supply-chain oriented indexes, a widely used benchmark of supply chain pressures–the New York Federal Reserve’s GSCPI–was also averaging close to its baseline level of 0.0 in September 2024 and its surrounding months.

To preserve informative level differences across products and services, individual categories’ index scores for the base period are calculated relative to the top-line value, rather than each category being anchored at 0.0. Certain level biases, such as groceries having a generally lower price sensitivity level than vacations, are logical and make sense to maintain within the data set. Therefore, the correct interpretation of a positive category-level index score, such as Trading Down for exercise equipment, would be: “Consumers are trading down on exercise equipment purchases more than they trade down on goods and services purchases in general during periods of normal inflation.” 

Fluctuations over time indicate both where a given category stands relative to the base value of zero, and how it has evolved historically. For instance, since 2022, topline Price Surprise values have mostly hovered above zero, which makes intuitive sense since inflation has been above-target during this time. Meanwhile, gas Price Surprise over this period initially had very high positive values, but recently has hovered below zero as energy price growth has been low or negative in recent years.

Note that while the September 2024 base period has been identified as the best option for a “normal inflation” base period within the current history of the SCICIP, a true 2.0% inflation period would be preferred as a baseline. Should inflation retreat to this level in the future, in correspondence with supply chain pressures close to neutral, the indexes may be rebased again. 

Why are we doing this? 

The indexes were originally designed with the intention that zero would serve as a neutral score, and positive scores would indicate positive inflationary pressures whereas negative scores would indicate deflationary pressures. For example, if in a given month a higher share of consumers reported slower delivery speeds than reported faster delivery speeds for goods ordered online, the Delivery Delays index would register a positive reading, indicative of tighter supply and, consequently, upward price pressures in supply chains. 

However, this did not play out in practice across all indexes, leading to persistent positive or negative biases propping up or holding down the “neutral level” of each index. For example, with Price Surprise, there will generally be a higher share of consumers seeing expected prices compared to higher-than-expected prices, because most people have a baseline awareness of where prices stand for most products before contemplating a purchase. Therefore, Price Surprise index values have typically been negative, creating the dilemma that in “normal times” (i.e., 2% average annual inflation per the Federal Reserve mandate), Price Surprise would be negative while price growth is modestly positive. For those not fully aware of the underlying calculations for the indexes, consistently negative Price Surprise values run the risk of being falsely interpreted as signifying declining prices. The construction of the indexes and underlying survey responses yields similar biases across other indexes; anchoring them all to a common base period helps neutralize these effects. 

Furthermore, before the common base period implementation,  the different “natural baselines” across indexes made it impractical to compare index levels across indicators. A negative Price Sensitivity value and a positive Substitutability index value for a given product had no relationship to one another; each score only had meaning relative to the “natural baseline” for that indicator. Now that all indexes share a common base period, a negative Price Sensitivity score and a positive Trading Down score are, in fact, informative, with the interpretation being that Trading Down has increased since September 2024. In contrast, Price Sensitivity has fallen over this period. 

Re-introducing Price Sensitivity 

Morning Consult has updated its methodology for the Price Sensitivity index to more precisely track the prevalence of high prices acting as the primary deterrent in consumers’ decisions not to purchase a given product or service. While the previous calculation tracked the prevalence of abandoning purchases due to high prices relative to the overall prevalence of consumers paying more than expected, the new calculation isolates only those consumers who faced higher-than-expected prices and compares purchase outcomes among this group.

Why are we doing this? 

The purpose of the price sensitivity index is to compare those who are price sensitive (i.e., weren’t willing to pay a higher than expected price) versus those who are not price sensitive (i.e., those willing to pay a higher than expected price). In the original calculation, the subtracted term was the share of all completed purchases with a higher-than-expected price. Seen over time, this share was mainly driven by changes in how often consumers were experiencing higher-than-expected prices (tracked by Price Surprise), more than by changes in how willing they were to pay high prices. 

From 2022 to early 2025, Price Surprise has generally trended down; as inflation cooled and fewer consumers experienced high prices, the “not price sensitive” term appeared to decline, as shown in the apparel example below. The new formulation seeks to neutralize the effect of Price Surprise (as this is tracked separately), so the second term isolates only “those willing to pay a higher than expected price when facing a higher than expected price”. In other words, we are isolating the consumer purchasing response to inflation with the new Price Sensitivity calculation, not the prevalence of experiencing inflation (tracked by Price Surprise).

Re-naming the Substitutability as the Trading Down index

Finally, we are renaming the Substitutability index as the Trading Down index. 

Why are we doing this? 

Initially, we selected Substitutability because, with a short history, the differences in levels across categories appeared driven more by consumers’ ability to substitute a given good or service than by their desire to substitute. For example, it is easier to substitute cheaper grocery items, such as by buying generic store brands, than to trade down on health care services, for which options might be limited by factors like geography or insurance. While this relationship still holds, the longer time series for the indexes has made the shifts in trading down levels over time a more prominent feature of the data set, rather than simply the level differences among categories. We on the economics team have found that, in practice, it is these shifts in overall prevalence of trading down (whether due to ability or desire) that are most informative to report on, so we are changing the title to reflect that. Expanding on our previous example, the Trading Down index would be used not only to compare whether groceries are being substituted more than health care services, but also how the prevalence of grocery trade-downs is shifting over time due to factors like food cost inflation.