The monthly inflation report for July 2025 from the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be watched closely for any evidence of President Donald Trump’s import tariffs starting to feed through to the prices consumers pay. 

CPI inflation jumped from 2.4% year-over-year in May, to 2.7% in June. 

That’s the overall, “all-items” measure of inflation. But prices don’t move in lock-step. Some prices have fallen since last year — including gasoline (-8.3%), shoes (-0.6%), baby clothes (-2.9%), jewelry (-3.6%), and smartphones (-14.2%).

In fact, even though overall inflation has been high since the pandemic hit, some consumer goods and services have stagnated or gone down in price over the last five to six years.

At Literary Arts, a bookstore in Portland, Oregon, lead book-buyer Alex Abraham said they’ve noticed prices have been changing. “What gets me” they said, “is you used to really reliably be able to find a middle-grade paperback for under $10, now they’re coming out $12, even $15 I’ve seen. And that’s just sad.”  

Abraham agreed to play a little game of ‘guess-the-inflation-rate,’ starting with books: “Definitely prices have gone up,” they said, “I would say by margins of a few dollars, which — I do work in books, so math is not my forte.”

In fact, book prices have risen 6% over the last six years. 

What about the inflation rate since 2019 overall? “Maybe 10%” they said. What about toys and computers? They thought toy prices have gone up, as well as computer prices. How about airfares? “I was just traveling — cross-country flight, under $400,” said Abraham. “If you were to tell me that airfare has actually gone down since 2019 I wouldn’t be surprised.”

Here are the answers: Prices overall from June 2019 to June 2025 are up a whopping 26%. Toys are down 9%, computers down 7.5%, airfares are about 8% lower than before the pandemic.

What’s more expensive? “Groceries, food products, automobiles,” said Rohit Tripathi, a supply-chain analyst at RELEX Solutions. Food and car prices are up from 20% to more than 30% since 2019. Other necessities are up sharply as well, including funeral expenses (+20%), rent (+31%), and auto insurance (+53%).

But, said Tripathi: “Inflation isn’t a blanket that you can apply across all categories of goods. In some cases we’ve seen prices come down — computers, televisions, home office furniture.”

In fact, many discretionary consumer goods have seen very little inflation. Prices for clothing, footwear, sporting goods have only risen in the single-digits since 2019. That’s even less than the Federal Reserve’s 2% per year inflation target, which would add up to 12.6% cumulatively over the six years from 2019 to 2025.

One reason, said equity analyst Arun Sundaram at CFRA Research: after the pandemic spending boom, consumers pulled back just as supply chains rebounded. “We have less demand and we have more supply,” said Sundaram. “And when supply exceeds demand, prices tend to come down.”

Also, said Sundaram: “Costs are coming down. And the main component that’s coming down is freight costs.” That’s especially the case for shipping from Asia, where a lot of cheap products like clothes and toys come from.

So what about consumer tech? Computer prices are down 7.5% since before the pandemic. TVs are down almost 40%.

Here, there’s a bit of explaining to do. It’s not like you’ll actually go into a big-box electronics store and see price tags that are much lower than they used to be, said Jay Hatfield at Infrastructure Capital Advisors. Instead, prices are unlikely to have gone up. “They try to maintain the price and increase the speed and capabilities of the computer, cram it full of a lot more processing and memory,” said Hatfield.

So, 5 or 6 years on, it’s a better, more valuable computer, TV, or smartphone. It’s incorporated new technology and more advanced chips. But the sticker price is more or less the same. And the inflation calculation adjusts for that, said Hatfield. “BLS does account for quality. That counts as a price decrease.”

So, what’s next for inflation dynamics in the U.S. economy? Tariffs. In particular, on many of the discretionary goods that have fallen or stagnated in price over the last five to six years. Like clothing, footwear, appliances, and tech gadgets. 

“Other than electronics, apparel is the most sensitive imported good to the tariffs we have put in place,” said Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab.

Those products have slim profit margins, making it hard for foreign producers and U.S. retailers to absorb the additional costs of tariffs. So they’re more likely to pass them on to consumers. 

Estimating the impact of all the tariffs President Trump has imposed so far, Tedeschi said: “If consumers bore the entirety of the tariff, prices would go up 1.8% overall over the next two to three years. It comes to $2,400 on average per household per year.”