What products are elastic?

Answer 1

It depends a great deal on how widely you define the product. For example, the demand for "food" is completely inelastic, since there are no substitutes for "food". However, demand for apples will be far more elastic than the demand for food, since if the price of apples increases people can switch quite easily to a cheaper fruit.

It is difficult to generalise what items are elastic, since not all items within the same group have equal "value" - brand loyalty for example will decrease elasticity for certain items. This means that, if I were to say that demand for baked beans was elastic, you could point out that Heinz baked beans experience far lower levels of price elasticity than other brands of baked beans.

However, generally (very generally), unbranded/supermarket branded food items, when not defined too widely, will experience an elastic "price elasticity".

Contrary to many expectations, fuel actually does seem to be price elastic - at least, to a certain level. Even though there are very few good substitutes for petrol etc... consumption does decrease when prices are raised.