Consumer Buying Power™ (CBP) provides estimates of annual consumer spending for nearly 700 household expenditure items, spanning 13 categories of goods and services, and over 100 retail store types. Use CBP to evaluate potential demand for a wide variety of products and services for any neighborhood in the U.S. Developed using the Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX), conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the database offers current-year estimates and five-year projections of potential consumer expenditures for all standard census, postal and marketing geographies.
With CBP you can analyze any area by total dollars spent or average dollars spent per consumer unit (A consumer unit is a household or any person living in a college dormitory). CBP helps you understand the full market potential as well as if customers in an area spend more or less when compared to other areas.
To help customers understand the change in demand over time, ENVISION reports include the expected annual percentage change from the current year to five years into the future. ENVISION also gives users access to an extensive library of executive reports that convey the key pieces of information your team needs to make decisions.
What's New
This year, significant changes in the CEX have led to many food and alcohol-related variables being dropped and merged into higher-level categories. The CEX no longer reports on granular food and alcohol spend, and this is reflected in CBP with the elimination of the Alcoholic beverages category and over 50 food variables. A few variables have also been dropped from the Entertainment, Reading, Education, and Tobacco Products and Smoking Supplies categories.
There are over 20 new variables added to this year’s CBP database, with nearly half in the Food category.
The below video (4:55 mins) covers product details, sources, methodology, applications and key questions about this product. Watching this video will give you an overview of the product and some ideas for how it can be used in your work.
Following the video, some additional resources are linked for your reference: release notes, variable list, and variable change list.