The mystery of the £39 orange

tl;dr

In January 2021, an Office for National Statistics agent surveyed a shop in the Yorkshire and the Humber region, and recorded an orange on sale for £39.

It was unbelievable. The eye-popping price reading for “Orange-class 1-each” was designated a class 2 validity code by the ONS — “rejected by user”.

Thankfully, many other price readings were deemed less outlandish, and statisticians eventually used 507 different oranges — priced between £1.29 and 14p — to generate an average price for that month: 37p.

How inflation data is collected is an interesting topic!