Consumer spending in World War II: the forgotten consumer expenditure surveys

To help mark the Monthly Labor Review’s 100th year, the editors invited several producers and users of BLS data to take a look back at the last 100 years. This article looks at two published but often neglected wartime consumer expenditure surveys—one that covered expenditures in 1941 and the first 3 months of 1942 and another that covered expenditures only of urban households in 1944— to place them into the historical context of changes in consumer spending patterns from the 1930s through 2013.