Not everything got more expensive. The Consumer Price Index tracks hundreds of items — and a remarkable handful have spent decades getting cheaper. Televisions. Toys. Computers. Apparel. These are the CPI’s deflationary heroes, and the story they tell is as dramatic as any inflation tale.
Five episodes into this series, the pattern has been relentless: prices going up. Groceries tripled. Gas quadrupled. Rent, hospital bills, tuition — all of them climbing year after year, decade after decade, grinding household budgets from every direction. But the Consumer Price Index is not a monolith. Buried inside its hundreds of categories are items that have done the opposite — items whose prices have fallen not just a little, but by staggering amounts over sustained periods.
The BLS tracks CPI sub-indices for televisions, toys, personal computers, and apparel, among others. When you chart these alongside the all-items CPI, the divergence is breathtaking. While the overall index rose 111% from 1996 to 2026, televisions fell 98.5%. Not a typo. The CPI index for televisions went from 65.8 in 1996 to 0.975 in 2026. A quality-adjusted television that cost $1,000 in 1996 costs roughly $15 today.
These deflationary categories share a common trait: they are all products of technology-driven manufacturing at global scale. And understanding why they got cheaper is just as important as understanding why healthcare and housing got more expensive — because the contrast reveals the central fault line of the modern American economy.
No item in the entire Consumer Price Index has experienced anything remotely close to what happened to televisions. The CPI television index stood at 65.8 in 1996. By 2026, it had fallen to 0.975 — a decline of 98.5%. This is the single most dramatic deflation in the history of American consumer prices.
The numbers are almost absurd. In 1996, a decent 27-inch CRT television cost $400 to $600. Today, a 65-inch 4K smart TV with built-in streaming apps costs $280 at Walmart. But the CPI doesn’t just track sticker prices — it applies hedonic quality adjustment, which means it accounts for the fact that today’s television is incomparably better than its 1996 ancestor. When you adjust for the resolution, screen size, color accuracy, smart features, and energy efficiency of a modern TV, the quality-adjusted price has essentially collapsed to near zero.
The forces behind this collapse are layered. Semiconductors follow Moore’s Law — processing power doubles roughly every two years while cost stays flat. Display manufacturing industrialized at breathtaking scale: the transition from cathode-ray tubes to LCD panels, then to LED-backlit panels, then to OLED, each generation manufactured in billion-dollar fabs in South Korea, China, and Taiwan that amortize their fixed costs across tens of millions of units per year. And streaming competition from Roku, Amazon, and Google turned the TV itself into a loss-leader platform — companies willing to sell hardware at cost to capture the revenue stream from content and advertising.
The chart below tells the story on a logarithmic scale, because on a linear chart the decline is so severe that the last fifteen years would be an indistinguishable line hugging zero.
Toys are the second great deflationary story in the CPI. The toys index stood at 82.6 in 1980 — already below the base year of 100 — and by 2026 had fallen to 27.8. That is a decline of 66.3% over 46 years. A toy that cost $20 in 1980 has an equivalent-quality counterpart selling for about $7 today, in nominal dollars. In real, inflation-adjusted terms, the deflation is even more extreme.
The explanation is straightforward but no less remarkable: Chinese manufacturing. When China entered the WTO in 2001, it accelerated a migration of toy production from the United States and Europe to Guangdong province factories that had already been underway for a decade. Labor costs in Shenzhen in the early 2000s were a fraction of American wages. Combined with Walmart’s legendary buying power — which squeezed supplier margins relentlessly — the result was a sustained, multi-decade compression of retail toy prices.
The shift from mechanical to electronic toys reinforced the trend. A 1980 toy was made of injection-molded plastic, metal springs, and hand-painted details. A 2026 toy is often a tablet-connected device with a microchip that costs pennies to produce. The same semiconductor cost curve that destroyed television prices drove down the cost of the electronic components inside modern toys.
The BLS only began publishing a separate CPI index for personal computers and peripherals in 2005, because hedonic quality adjustment made historical comparison nearly impossible. What does it mean to compare a 1990 desktop with 4 MB of RAM to a 2026 laptop with 16 GB? The performance-per-dollar improvement is so vast that any price index attempting to span that gap produces numbers that seem fictional.
Even within the truncated 2005–2026 window, the decline is dramatic. The computer CPI index fell from 155.7 in 2005 to 34.8 in 2026 — a drop of 77.7%. That is an annualized decline of 6.8% per year, every single year, for two decades. No other durable good comes close to this rate of sustained price collapse.
The paradox is this: consumers don’t feel computers getting cheaper, because they tend to buy the best machine available at a roughly constant price point. A laptop cost around $1,000 in 2005 and still costs around $1,000 in 2026. But the 2026 machine has thousands of times more storage, hundreds of times more processing power, a vastly better screen, and capabilities — video editing, AI processing, all-day battery life — that would have been unimaginable in 2005. The CPI captures this: the quality-adjusted price has collapsed, even if the sticker price has not.
Apparel is the odd one out in this group. Unlike televisions, toys, and computers, clothing prices didn’t actually fall — they just barely rose. The CPI apparel index went from 88.1 in 1980 to 132.7 in 2026, an increase of 50.6%. That sounds like inflation, but compare it to the all-items CPI, which rose 318.7% over the same period. In real terms, clothing has gotten dramatically cheaper — it just didn’t go negative in nominal terms.
The story is globalization, plain and simple. Garment manufacturing is one of the most labor-intensive industries on earth — it resists automation because fabric is floppy, irregular, and difficult for machines to handle. So the industry migrated to wherever labor was cheapest: first to Japan and Hong Kong in the 1960s, then to South Korea and Taiwan in the 1970s, then to China in the 1990s, then to Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Ethiopia in the 2010s. Each wave pushed production costs lower.
Fast fashion accelerated the trend. Zara, H&M, and Shein built supply chains that could move a design from sketch to store shelf in weeks rather than months, producing massive volumes at razor-thin margins. The result: a basic cotton t-shirt that cost $12 in 1990 costs $8 in 2026, even as the cotton, shipping, and retail rent that go into it all got more expensive. The labor savings from offshore manufacturing more than offset every other cost increase.
The table below summarizes the four deflationary categories alongside the all-items CPI for comparison. Each row shows the base year from which the index is measured, the starting and ending values, the total cumulative change, and the annualized rate of change. Televisions declined at an annualized rate of 13.1% per year for three decades — a pace of deflation that has no parallel anywhere in the consumer economy.
| Category | Base Year | Start Index | 2026 Index | Change | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Televisions | 1996 | 65.8 | 0.975 | −98.5% | −13.1% |
| Computers | 2005 | 155.7 | 34.8 | −77.7% | −6.8% |
| Toys | 1980 | 82.6 | 27.8 | −66.3% | −2.3% |
| Apparel | 1980 | 88.1 | 132.7 | +50.6% | +0.9% |
| All Items (CPI-U) | 1980 | 78.0 | 326.6 | +318.7% | +3.1% |
The deflationary heroes of the CPI share one trait: technology-driven manufacturing at global scale. Televisions fell 98.5% because semiconductors follow Moore’s Law and screens can be manufactured in billion-dollar fabs that amortize fixed costs across millions of units. Toys fell because Chinese factories could produce at a fraction of American labor costs. Apparel barely budged because garment manufacturing migrated to wherever wages were lowest.
The common thread: if it can be manufactured in a factory and shipped in a container, its price tends to fall. If it requires a human to show up in person — a doctor, a teacher, a landlord — its price tends to rise. That divergence is the central story of American inflation, and we’ll explore it fully in Episode 10.