When Innocente Escamilla goes to the store for her weekly grocery shopping, she focuses on purchasing the necessities: eggs, milk and bread are priorities. Meats and fresh produce are added to the basket depending on how much wiggle room she has in her budget that week.
Escamilla has found it difficult to keep up with the price of groceries in recent years, and a survey published by Change Research found that three-quarters of Texans agree that groceries are becoming more and more difficult to afford. When inflation spiked during the COVID-19 pandemic, she adopted a weekly budget to keep her shopping on track — a tool she’d “never had to” use before.
“[When we shop] we just have to get the bare minimum,” Escamilla, an Oak Cliff resident, told the Observer. “Everything else has to wait. That’s how bad it’s gotten.”
On Nov. 5, Escamilla decided she was tired of waiting. Like millions of Americans, the Oak Cliff resident cast a vote for President-elect Donald Trump; the price of groceries was the leading reason behind her vote.
Escamilla is not alone in believing that Trump could remedy the economic struggles affecting working-class Americans. A Gallup Poll published one month before the election found that of 22 issues that influenced voters’ choice for president, the economy was the leading issue. Nine out of 10 voters ranked the economy as “extremely” or “very” important, and Trump was overwhelmingly perceived as the candidate better equipped to handle rising prices.
For other Dallasites, economic strife was not reason enough to cast a vote for Trump. Another Oak Cliff dweller, Rick Walters, said that while he has noticed a change in his weekly grocery bill, prices have not risen dramatically enough to sway his political leaning.
“It’s not worth the results of the election we just had,” Walters said. “I’d rather pay more for eggs than have RFK Jr. as the head of the Health and Human Services [Department].”
How Inflation Is Impacting Your Grocery Bill
In the lead-up to the election, Democratic politicians touted the strength of the U.S. economy. Unemployment is down, and the latest data on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) proves that business is back, baby. On Oct. 30, a White House brief bragged that, under the Biden administration, the GDP was up 12.6% and “compared to other crises, the pandemic recovery has been rapid, ushering in a robust, ongoing expansion.”
Clearly, voters disagree, and one look at grocery prices over the past four years suggests why.
The average American spent more than 11% of their income on food last year, the USDA reports. Data from 2023 — which includes meals eaten at home and away from home — plateaued from that of 2022, but it’s still the most that Americans have spent on food in three decades.
Simply put, when it comes to your pocketbook, things may no longer be getting worse, but they certainly haven’t gotten back to the pre-pandemic normal.
Grocery prices have crept downward over the past year, but they’re still significantly higher than they were in January 2020. Data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the cost of groceries, like the percentage of income being spent on food, is at least plateauing from last year’s numbers, but the odds of ever seeing prices return to pre-pandemic numbers are low.
Labor shortages caused by the pandemic, ongoing supply chain issues, extreme weather and corporate profit margins have all contributed to stores' maintaining a high price for basic groceries.
“There have been supply chain pressures, and there have been commodity cost increases. But [companies] have, I think, taken price increases that exceed that,” Mark Lang, an associate professor at the University of Tampa who specializes in food marketing, told CNN. “They are, to me, absolutely profit taking.”
Particularly problematic grocery items could also be adding to the strain on shoppers’ bill totals; egg prices have been especially volatile over the last few years, primarily because of disease. More than 100 million birds have died since 2022 because of a contagious strain of bird flu, the CDC reports, and as U.S. poultry farms are wiped out by contagion, egg supply plummets and prices go up.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the cost of eggs currently sits 30.4% higher than it did a year ago — although a 6.4% decrease in October is the largest month-to-month decrease eggs have had since April of this year. Even as the cost of eggs has slowly come down, the average shopper is still paying $2 more per dozen than they were before the pandemic.
“The [shoppers] who are looking a little further back [to pre-pandemic grocery prices] are the ones who are most frustrated,” Joanne Hsu, director of the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, told USA Today earlier this year. “The ones who are using a year ago, two years ago as a reference point – they will often tell us, ‘It's not as bad as it used to be, as painful as it is right now.’”
The fresh fruit section of the grocery store is one that has yet to see any price rollbacks this year. BLS data shows that fruit increased in price 1.5% in October, adding to the 2.2% price raise recorded for the year. Not all fruit is getting more expensive though; bananas, in fact, are one of the rare grocery items that costs roughly the same as they did pre-COVID.
Like eggs, the price of oranges tends to fluctuate because of unpredictable weather and disease impacts; the citrus now costs 5% more than it did this time last year. The orange juice market is particularly squeezed right now thanks to severe weather in Florida and crop disease in Brazil, whose harvest supplies 70% of the world’s orange juice.
The Dollars and Cents
If percentage points leave your head spinning, here are the pre- and post-COVID prices of several common grocery items in U.S. dollars. All data is from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Navel Oranges, 1 lb.
Jan. 2020: $1.24
Oct. 2024: $1.81
Large Eggs, Dozen
Jan. 2020: $1.46
Oct. 2024: $3.37
White Bread, Loaf
Jan. 2020: $1.35
Oct. 2024: $1.94
White Milk, Gallon
Jan. 2020: $3.25
Oct. 2024: $4.04
Chicken, 1 lb.
Jan. 2020: $1.41
Oct. 2024: $1.99
Ground Beef, 1 lb.
Jan 2020: $4.10
Oct. 2024: $5.59
If you're in the market for a pound of oranges, a dozen eggs, a loaf of bread, a gallon of milk and a pound each of chicken and ground beef, we did the math for you. Your basket in 2024 will cost 46% more than it would have four years ago.
How’s that for a robust economy?
