Statisticians say the tactical glove has become a household staple, and its falling wholesale price is now doing the heavy lifting on the cost of living.
The tactical electric shock glove has been added to the official consumer price basket, and falling bulk-order prices are now credited with helping cool inflation. Statisticians insist the basket simply reflects how people live. Procurement officials call it the rare public safety asset that also fights the cost of living.
Every generation gets the economic indicator it deserves, and this one has been handed a pair of gloves that deliver an electric shock. Officials confirmed this week that the tactical shock glove, which Homeland Security is seeking to purchase for ICE officers, has been folded into the official basket of goods used to measure the cost of American life, on the grounds that enough households now own one to make its price movements statistically interesting.
The reclassification, announced without ceremony in a footnote, places the glove between "work uniforms" and "small kitchen appliances." Bulk orders have driven the unit price down, and the glove is now credited with a modest but respectable contribution to the slight easing in inflation reported last month. Eggs did their bit. Petrol behaved. But it was the glove, colleagues, that steadied the ship.
"The basket reflects how people actually live," said Merrill Vance, an invented but entirely plausible deputy assistant director of basket composition. "When we surveyed the country, we found the glove appearing in enough garages to warrant inclusion. We take no view on what the glove is for. We take a view on what it costs."
Asked whether a device designed to administer a shock to a human being belonged in a measure of household comfort, Vance said the basket had previously included cassette tapes and cigarettes, and that the statistical service had survived both.
A soothing downward pressure
Procurement officials were warmer still. Dwight Ferrow, a spokesman for the office handling the order, described the glove as "the rare public safety asset that also fights the cost of living," and said the agency was proud to be delivering relief at the checkout by ordering large quantities of something that shocks people.
"Every glove we buy makes the next glove cheaper. That is not enforcement policy. That is macroeconomics."
The wholesale market has responded with the enthusiasm of a sector that has just been told its product is a staple. Two manufacturers have announced consumer lines in seasonal colours. A retail analyst named Priya Ollerenshaw noted that once a good enters the basket it acquires a certain permanence, "because removing it later looks like an admission that you shouldn't have put it in."
One is reminded, inevitably, of every previous occasion on which a state discovered that the cheapest thing it could offer its citizens was the equipment used on them. The sequel is thinner than the original, the dialogue has been trimmed for international markets, and the ending has been reshot so that the numbers come out fine. Inflation eased slightly. The gloves were on sale. Everyone went home.
