Food prices are going up. Because of coronavirus, experts can’t say by how much.

The city’s stay-at-home orders have slashed the number of customers coming through his door, and now Harry Coleman faces a new problem.

His mom-and-pop bakery in West Kendall, Empanada Harry’s, is feeling the squeeze from a new enemy: inflation.

The price of a box of 15 dozen eggs that normally costs between $20 to $24 has more than doubled to $55. A 40-pound box of chicken has gone from $40 to $66.

“It really adds up,” lamented Coleman, owner of the Empanada Harry’s in West Kendall.

But how much those products are going up in price is uncertain. The coronavirus has put an abrupt halt to the Labor Department’s in-store data collection efforts to measure inflation.

Those changes in what Coleman pays for ingredients and what he charges customers are usually captured in the agency’s broad measurement of price changes across the country, called the monthly Consumer Price Index.

That index is calculated by actual people, who go out to survey the prices of more than 80,000 items across the country — and those people aren’t going out anymore.

That’s because on March 16, the Labor Department quietly issued its own stay-at-home coronavirus order to protect its data-collection specialists, who on any given month are fanning out to measure price changes at stores and offices in Florida and across the nation.

When the Labor Department on Friday puts out the monthly index covering the month of March, it will be putting out a dataset that is incomplete — and won’t fully capture the pinch that businesses like Empanada Harry’s and average consumers are feeling at the cash register.

The March data to be released Friday will reflect only 16 days of actual data collection at establishments. The April data to be released in May is likely to reflect scant visits to establishments.

Businesses like Empanada Harry’s are feeling the price shifts acutely.

The bakery enjoyed modest profits, but they’ve slid to razor-thin margins on dishes that require a lot of eggs. Those include his unique smoked flan and meringue-topped rum-flavored tres leches and the dough he uses for his signature cheese-stuffed tequeños.

Coleman has resisted raising prices for his regulars who long supported the husband-and-wife business before the coronavirus. Yet now he must choose between price hikes or cutting egg-heavy products from the menu.

“If it continues, we might have to look at trimming,” he said.

Inflation is the change in prices across the economy. The CPI tells consumers how far their dollar stretches, measuring prices for every imaginable food product and consumer good. It also measures the price of a hotel stay, a doctor visit, a new car, a gallon of gasoline and even rent and its equivalent for homeowners.

The index measures changes in price, up and down, taking a scientific sample of more than 80,000 items. They are separated into eight major groupings and calculated together to determine the monthly rate of inflation.

The agency has tried to fill in some of the gaps with emails and calls to establishments, but during the first two months of 2020 more than 65 percent of the data in the CPI came from actual visits to establishments.

“We’re going to collect prices and produce as accurate an index as we can,” said Stephen B. Reed, an economist in the Office of Prices and Living Conditions for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Having an accurate CPI is vital to the economy. The CPI is used as a reference for everything from calculating cost-of-living adjustments for Social Security recipients to determining salaries based on local costs of living to the Federal Reserve deciding where to set its benchmark interest rates.

The Labor Department issued further guidance Tuesday afternoon, saying it would offer a statistical inference of the missing number for March and will do April data from a smaller sample set. If the April data fails an adequacy ratio, the agency could opt to skip a month of publishing the index, it said, something that has never happened.

The only other interruption to collection of inflation data in the survey’s 103-year history was in October 2013 amid a budget fight that partially shut down the federal government. October’s release of September’s inflation data was delayed, and then the November 2013 release of October data was based on a smaller-than-usual sample of data collected.

“The shutdown is the closest comparison,” said Reed.

Meanwhile, social media is full of complaints about rising prices, some consumers even suggesting price gouging is at play.

Adriana Menendez couldn’t find eggs at Publix in Coral Gables when she visited “armed with a mask and gloves.” Her next stop was the nearby Presidente Supermarket on Flagler, where she was stunned that a carton of regular eggs was now $3.99, and $4.39 for a dozen jumbo eggs.

“I couldn’t believe I paid that for a carton of eggs,” Menendez said.

For Holly Cohen, the scarcity of eggs has meant she’s barely looking at grocery prices anymore. For a week, she’d tried to order eggs along with other groceries from Amazon.com. When they became available, she clicked quickly and plunked down more than $4 for a dozen eggs.

“You get to a point where I feel so lucky I could get eggs I didn’t care what the price was,” the North Gables resident said.

So what’s going on?

Basic economic theory holds that when a good or service becomes scarce — because of rising demand, falling supply, delivery issues or any combination of these — prices rise.

“You basically have a static supply and a sharp increase in demand,” explained Brian Moscogiuri, and egg-industry analyst and director of Urner Barry, a commodity research group whose data is used to create the benchmark contract price for egg producers and buyers.

Stay-at-home orders across the nation led to panic buying, which has made the supply of eggs scarcer but is unlikely to reflect a longer-run inflationary trend, he said.

And that’s why the CPI and its hamstrung collection is important.

The CPI is a guidepost that reliably spotlights what’s happening to prices across the economy. Data collection at establishments will resume after health officials determine it is safe for the nation to get back to work and businesses reopen.

But for the next few months, the data may not fully capture these inflationary spikes being felt by families and businesses alike.