10 products bucking inflation trends

Before the start of the Iraq War, filling your vehicle's fuel tank typically cost far less than a nice dinner on the town, which is about what it equates to today.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, gasoline cost an average of $3.54 a gallon in February 2013 -- or about $71 for a 20-gallon tank. That was up 131% from a decade ago, when gas cost $1.53 a gallon, or $31 for the same size tank.

Indira Amladi, the senior portfolio manager at Princeton Ivy Capital Advisors in New York, says gasoline prices have been driven higher largely by an increase in global demand as the population of drivers has exploded in countries such as China, as well as a decrease in supply, in part due to political turmoil in key oil-producing nations.

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According to online precious metals tracker Monex, the value of gold has soared from $350 per ounce in 2003 to about $1,650 per ounce in mid-February 2013.

That's an inflationary bump of 371%.

The rising price of the treasured yellow metal has been fueled largely by investor demand. Amladi also cites the impact of Russian actions on gold prices.

"We've learned lately that Russia and (President Vladimir) Putin are actually holding a lot of gold bullion. The Russians have been hoarding a lot of gold," Amladi says. "Putin's view is that the developed countries are printing so many (paper) notes, and he believes that's a misguided way of (structuring a national economy). So the Russians have walls and walls of gold that they have accumulated. And that has driven the price of gold up."

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Gourmet coffee wasn't part of the mainstream diet until fairly recently. So you may be inclined to blame Starbucks and its fashionable coffee drinks, such as lattes and cappuccinos, for boosting java prices.

But a far larger factor in the upward percolation of coffee prices has been a decline in global supply, rooted partly in poor recent harvests in South America, says Andrew Schrage, the editor of the personal-finance blog Money Crashers.

In 2011, wholesale coffee bean prices exceeded $3 per pound for the first time in more than 30 years after spotty harvests of high-grade Arabica beans. The slackened supply was coupled with an increased thirst for gourmet coffees among middle-class consumers in China, India and Indonesia, experts say.

According to the International Coffee Organization, the composite wholesale price for coffee was 51.9 cents per pound in 2003. In January 2013, the price was $1.35 per pound -- an increase of 160%.

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In 2002, a dozen eggs cost an average of $1.18, and in 2012 that same carton ran $2.01, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To find out why eggs have been in the midst of 70% inflationary hike, we head back to another lesson straight from freshman college economics class: the rising cost of production.

"It's due to an increase in the cost of crops used to feed and raise poultry," Amladi says, adding that fuel and transportation bills are higher as well for egg producers, causing them to boost prices to turn a profit.

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Sometimes higher costs are driven simply by packaging tactics -- or hype -- for new products.

Case in point: In 2006, Gillette decided to charge $27.99 for eight cartridges for use in its battery-operated, six-blade Fusion Power razor. Bloomberg Businessweek described the move as "the most dramatic inflation news" of that summer. The cartridges, at about $3.50 apiece, were priced 80% higher than the previous-generation Mach3 blades that Gillette unveiled in 1998.

Gillette charged $11 to $13 for a four-pack of Fusion blades until 2010, when it suddenly removed one blade from the pack without changing the price. That meant consumers paid up to $4.33 per razor, an increase of 33%, according to the Consumerist, a blog owned by Consumer Reports.

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They're getting wider, clearer, thinner -- and cheaper.

In 1997, a 28-inch Samsung color TV was priced around $750. In 2012, a 32-inch Samsung LED TV ran consumers $330, according to Target.com -- a deflationary rate of 56%.

"Across consumer technology, the prices have come down," says Amladi. "This is about the concept of innovation. When something is created, the innovator -- in the beginning -- needs a lot of capital to expand and to sell the product. Initially, innovation tends to be expensive. And the products may be few, so they, too, are more expensive.

"But over time, the more the company produces and sells, there is more mass acceptance of the product," Amladi says. "Eventually, all that hits a critical mass, at which point the prices start falling. That's because, by that point, the producer doesn't need to price it as high to make a profit."

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Back in 2000, Blockbuster charged $5 for each movie it rented -- not including possible late fees, reports Craig Zawada, a senior vice president at PROS, a Houston-based profitability-management and optimization software company.

Today, you can download a movie to rent from iTunes, Netflix, your cable company or other provider for as little as $2.99.

That means the deflation rate for a Friday night movie at home is as much as 40%.

"The reason for the cost of movies declining is simple: Technology today is far more advanced than it was in 2000," Zawada says. "And with the presence of online marketplaces like iTunes, the owner of the movie rights can operate at a lower cost and thus charge lower prices," he adds.

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In January 2003, natural gas cost about $196.31 per 1,000 cubic meters. In January 2013, the price was about $119.78 -- a deflation rate of 39%, according to the website IndexMundi, which tracks commodities.

When compared with the peak price of natural gas during the last decade -- $490.82 in October 2005 -- the cost has plummeted by 76%.

"Natural gas prices are down mainly because of two reasons. First, there's less demand, with milder winters and summers" in many parts of the country over the past 10 years, Zawada said.

And two: "More supply. The high costs of transport have led to other countries developing their own sources of natural gas, further leaving the U.S. with excess which, in turn, pushes the price down."

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Now that virtually every American adult -- and many kids -- have tiny phones in their pockets, it may be a bit jarring to recall that in 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x mobile telephone was priced at an astounding $4,000, according to the website Geekosystem.

Download movies from the mid-1980s and you'll see that iconic brick of a phone. Think of Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street," strolling the sandy beach and lugging it along as a status symbol. By 2012, you could get the most advanced smartphones for about $399, a price decline of 90% for a product that is many times superior to the original.

Just as with other electronic devices, early innovation drove prices high but as more comparable products flooded the market, prices soon were driven down to fit the budgets of ordinary consumers.

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The year was 1977. Back then, an Apple II computer with 48KB of memory would have cost you $2,638, according to Geekosystem. That's $10,000 in 2012 dollars.

Today a faster, lighter and more user-friendly 13-inch MacBook Pro costs $1,499.

Windows-based PCs, which generally aren't as expensive as Macs, have fallen even more in price. Consider the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80, which debuted in 1977 with a 1.77 megahertz processor, 4KB of memory and no mouse. Back then it retailed for $599, according to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., the equivalent to $2,273 today.

For that price, you can buy two HP Pavilion HPE Phoenix h9-1150s, each with 2TB of hard drive space, Blu-ray players and 10GBs of memory . . . and you would still have $150 left over.

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