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I was just asked, in referring to the sentence: “The price of goods in big cities is usually higher than in small cities,” if it’s okay to swap “price of goods” for “prices of goods.” I said that goods is a singular group, and prices would only be acceptable if you put a modifying adjective that breaks the singular group into multiple groups such as “the prices of various goods in big cities,” but now I’m starting to wonder if that’s correct.

Jon
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    Its just a matter of singular and plural. – Ram Pillai Mar 14 '20 at 13:26
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    Your statement "that goods is a singular group, and prices would only be acceptable if you put a modifying adjective that breaks the singular group into multiple groups such as “the prices of various goods in big cities,” is correct but over-prescriptive: the plural implies the individual prices of individual goods, whereas the singular implies the generality of the price. – Greybeard Mar 14 '20 at 14:29
  • I'm guessing this question is a dup... (And it has nothing to do, per se, with prices or goods.) – Drew Jul 07 '21 at 15:49
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    Does this answer your question? "They're using a cell phone" vs. "They're using cell phones". Here, “The price of goods in big cities is usually higher than in small cities” and “The prices of goods in big cities are usually higher than in small cities” are both fine and mean virtually the same thing. – Edwin Ashworth Nov 04 '21 at 19:18

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The results yielded from the iWeb Corpus indicate that both are correct and that "goods prices" and "goods price" are also accepted but not so frequently used.

Anshan Today
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