Apparel
Clothing and footwear, 4 fixed-good SKUs (Carli mean): Levi's 501 Original Fit, Converse Chuck Taylor Core Ox, Dr. Martens 1460, Dickies Original 874. Anchored at the 2000 base by JCPenney catalog list prices, continued from retailer/Wayback captures. No CPI fallback.
Sources
Precedence ladder for apparel. Lower precedence wins where multiple sources cover the same period. The engine walks the ladder per period with chain-link rescale at source transitions.
| Precedence | Source | Series ID | Cadence | Geography |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Levi's 501 Original Fit MSRP (levi.com + JCPenney catalogs) Levi's 501 Original Fit (pre-shrunk) MSRP — JCPenney catalog anchors 2000/2005 + levi.com/Wayback (wash 00501-0134 pinned). Replaces the STF series at v1.0.14. |
levis_501_original_fit_msrp_us | — | national |
| 0 | Converse Chuck Taylor All Star Core Ox list price Converse Chuck Taylor All Star Core Ox (black) list — JCPenney catalog 2000/2005 + Zappos/Wayback 2011-2022. |
converse_chuck_taylor_coreox_msrp_us | — | national |
| 0 | Dr. Martens 1460 list price Dr. Martens 1460 (black smooth) list — Zappos/Wayback 2016-2024, chain-link entry at 2016. |
dr_martens_1460_msrp_us | — | national |
| 0 | Dickies Original 874 list price Dickies Original 874 work pant list — dickies.com/Wayback SFCC standard price 2016-2022, chain-link entry at 2016. |
dickies_874_list_us | — | national |
Weight across archetypes
How apparel is weighted in each of the 10 published archetypes. Sorted by weight, highest first. National Average is the headline citation surface.
| Archetype | Weight | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Income — Highest Quintile | 9.3418% | View archetype → |
| Working Parent | 8.1207% | View archetype → |
| Income — Fourth Quintile | 7.4320% | View archetype → |
| Homeowner | 7.1499% | View archetype → |
| National Average | 6.9491% | View archetype → |
| Renter | 6.4739% | View archetype → |
| Income — Middle Quintile | 6.3643% | View archetype → |
| Income — Second Quintile | 6.0643% | View archetype → |
| Income — Lowest Quintile | 5.1506% | View archetype → |
| Retiree | 5.1151% | View archetype → |
Substitution history
Substitution log entries that touched this stratum. Each entry
bumps the basket version and is reproducible from observations
tagged with their basket_version.
2026-07-03 — Apparel deepened 1 → 4 SKUs; shelter-owned split into property tax + maintenance
Version: basket 1.0.13 → 1.0.14 · methodology 2.1.0 → 2.2.0
What changed. Two changes shipped together. (a) The apparel stratum went from a single SKU (Levi's 501 Shrink-to-Fit, 2010+) to a Carli mean of four fixed goods: Levi's 501 ORIGINAL FIT (pre-shrunk, wash 00501-0134 pinned), Converse Chuck Taylor All Star Core Ox, Dr. Martens 1460, and the newly-added Dickies Original 874 work pant. (b) The shelter_owned_operating stratum was split into two: shelter_property_tax (58%) and shelter_maintenance (42%, BLS PPI WPUIP2320001 via FRED). Strata count 16 → 17.
Why. Apparel: the 2000 JCPenney Big Book item is the pre-shrunk Original Fit, a different good from the rigid STF previously tracked. Rather than splice two goods with no overlap year, the series switches — which also anchors apparel AT the 2000 base (it previously began 2010) and broadens a one-item stratum to denim + sneaker + boot + workwear. Shelter: property tax alone stood in for the whole owned-operating line; the split prices the CEX-2000 maintenance bundle separately. Water/sewer (13.1% of the CEX line) has no free non-CPI price source and is carried pro-rata by the two priced legs — disclosed, not silently dropped. The maintenance leg is an INPUT-cost proxy (materials, not contractor prices); property tax per capita is a cost-burden measure that embeds home-value growth. Both disclosed.
Effect on headline. National Average headline 3.59 → 3.55%/yr. Apparel long-run +1.99%/yr over the full 2000-2025 window. Gap years within each apparel SKU are left as honest gaps (no interpolation); unverifiable provisional prices were dropped rather than shipped.
Methodology
See the basket page for all 17 strata and the per-stratum source map. The methodology page covers the load-bearing pillars including the rules around source-precedence ladders, chain-link splicing at source transitions, and the no-fabricated-data invariant.