18 COST OF LIVING IN TWELVE CITIES 
chain stores has been so rapid that independent neighbor- 
hood stores have found it necessary to bring their prices in 
line with chain store prices. These factors and others have 
contributed to the establishment of standard prices for many 
important articles of food which has tended to reduce what- 
ever differences in the cost of food existed between different 
sections of the country. 
There still remains the question of price differentials be- 
tween cities of different size which is supposedly due to the 
greater cost of doing business in large cities and to the greater 
cost of bringing commodities to the market. But even this 
difference appears to be exaggerated. The results of this 
study show that the highest cost of the food budget was 
found in New York City, but the second highest was Leo- 
minster, Massachusetts, the smallest city covered. In one, 
the population was 5,620,048, and in the other, 19,744. The 
weekly cost of the food budget in New York City was $11.94 
and in Leominster $11.59, while at the other extreme it was 
$10.70 in Marion, Ohio. Between the cities of highest and 
lowest cost there was a difference of only $1.24 or 10.49. 
Food costs in the different cities are given in detail in 
Table 5. These data emphasize the remarkable uniformity 
in the costs of important articles in the food budget and 
make inevitable the conclusion that differences in prices of 
food staples have been frequently over-estimated. It would 
appear that differences in costs of significant proportions 
between different cities or sections are likely to be due to 
different living standards which call for different articles or 
different qualities of the same article in the various localities. 
Because of the large proportion of the entire budget cost 
which is assigned to food, this similarity in food costs has 
the effect of keeping to small proportions the differences be- 
tween cities in the total cost of living.