HOW’S YOUR GROCERY BILL?

A Times Free Press Business section-front headline last Wednesday stated: “Top Federal Reserve official says inflation fight seems nearly won.”

We hope the point of the article is correct — “that inflation will continue falling this year back to the Fed’s 2% target level.”

You may have heard President Joe Biden crowing here and there about bringing inflation down or that falling inflation is proof that “Bidenomics” is working. We also read that inside the White House the president and administration officials can’t understand why the falling inflation rate isn’t wooing voters to re-elect their guy to another term.

The reasons for that go beyond inflation, we believe, but we also think the general public isn’t fooled to conclude that lower inflation means they’re back to paying the same prices for groceries as they did in the pre-COVID days of 2019 when Donald Trump was president.

Inflation may be cooling off, but prices for staples are still at their inflationary highs (or there about).

To prove that, we took a baker’s dozen of items bought in the second half of 2019 and compared their prices to the same 13 items bought in the last few months of 2023 and early 2024.

We compared the same brands bought in the same amounts at the same store (Walmart). We selected only items we could decipher from the receipt shorthand. The items were paper towels, toilet tissue, deodorant, Smartwater, diet soft drinks, coffee creamer, bacon, butter, bottled water, eggs, bread, facial tissue and bananas.

At least most of the items mentioned are purchased at some time or another by most consumers.

The 13 items in 2019 cost us $60.66 (not including sales tax), but the 2023/2024 purchases set us back $84.60, an increase of 39.5%. If a week’s worth of grocery items cost an additional $23.94, that’s $1,244.88 extra per year.

According to the U.S. Inflation Calculator, as compiled from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures by the CoinNews Media Group, food inflation increased 3.9% in 2020 (during the COVIC pandemic), 6.3% in 2021, 10.4% in 2022 and 2.7% in 2023.

Since our items were purchased in 2019, prices according to the calculator have risen a combined 23.3%. A different chart showing the average rate of increase by year puts the total since 2019 at 23%.

Why our baker’s dozen items were around 16% higher than all food inflation from 2020 to 2024 is unclear, but it could have to do with the fact not everything was food (paper products and deodorant, for instance), with the specific items purchased (not everyone buys vapor distilled water or liquid coffee creamer) and with the brands purchased (about a mix of store brand and name brand).

Since all items came from a big-box retailer, we can’t imagine buying each item on average at a lower price unless we drove from grocery store to grocery store to find their on-sale items, then sought out dollar stores and then hit Walmart for the rest. Because then you have to talk about the price of gasoline, how it increased (and then fell) over the same period, and you have a different inflation editorial.

As to the individual items we purchased, the highest inflation hit the paper product staples — paper towels up 69.7% and toilet tissue up 53.9%. Other items that saw their prices jump by at least half were bananas (up 55.9%) and coffee creamer (up 53.2%).

The additional items that increased more than general food inflation were diet soft drinks (39.7%), bottled water (35.8%), butter (33.6%) and Smartwater (27.7%).

The closest item to hitting the combined inflation mark since 2020 was facial tissue, which increased 21.5%.

The items that increased less than the cost of inflation over the period were deodorant (16.8%), bacon (14.3%), eggs (12.4%) and bread (9.3%).

Of course, as the commercials used to warn us, your prices may vary.

Biden and his disciples in the national media also like to tell us that for the past 10 months, the growth of wages has increased more than the growth of inflation. We hope that continues to be true, but we would also note that the growth of wages has fallen or remained the same since March 2023, while the growth of inflation has ticked ever closer to the growth of wages, including in December when it increased an unexpected 3.4%.

What is never mentioned, though, is that dark period between April 2021 — three months after the president was inaugurated — and February 2023, when inflation raged.

Today, with a national election 10 months away, voters may hear that their economic condition is supposed to be much improved. But when they examine their actual circumstances, as we did with an apples-to-apples comparison of real prices, they understand they’re not as well off as they’re being told.