It's not all the funny when you consider that prices fluctuate so wildly that including them would make the numbers meaningless. Even though they are excluded,

It's not all the funny when you consider that prices fluctuate so wildly that including them would make the numbers meaningless. Even though they are excluded, they are still a component of other inflation factors. Food & energy costs contribute to the cost of materials & labor. So they are included by proxy in the long term. And if you are really interested, the Fed does calculate personal consumption expenditures (PCE). See below. https://www.bea.gov/data/personal-consumption-expenditures-price-index https://www.bea.gov/data/personal-consumption-expenditures-p... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PCE As you can see, long term, the trend matches that of inflation. Short term, it is all over the place.