Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I don’t understand what is your “surprise” As I said, pasta ranges in price very widely here. So do coffee and wine. So I do not know what it means when somebody says coffee costs and wine costs . How can it be so standardized?
You can calculate a weighted average of some sort. Or you may sort them in categories and compute the average for each category. For instance you can say that wine in the UK costs on average 9£ per litre and that cheap wine cost 5-7£ per litre (I’m making up numbers).
But the source here, I believe was from an executive of a pasta factory.
It would be surprising to me if essentially all the pasta in Italy was made by one producer and sold at one price, such that you could talk about trends in fractions of a Euro based on one interview like this.
I'm used to staples being sold at different price points within a grocery store and across different stores or different communities.
Not a range of 40-80% like your sample numbers, but 300% or more.