Many Americans still struggle to keep up with the inflation while grocery prices continue to go up
Even though inflation has been going down for seven months in a row, the price of food, which is a big part of every American’s budget, keeps going up.
According to federal labor data, grocery prices went up in January, even though prices in the U.S. as a whole went down slightly from the month before. The Labor Department said on Tuesday that prices for food people buy at stores to make their own meals went up 11.3% in January compared to a year earlier.
Even though the overall inflation rate is slowly going down because prices for things like used cars and airline fees are going down, many households are still feeling the pinch. Seniors and people with low incomes suffer the most from prices that don’t go down in the grocery store. Even though Social Security recipients got an 8.7% cost-of-living increase for 2023, which is the biggest increase since 1981, this increase is still less than what food costs have gone up, and poor people tend to spend more of their money on food.
“Leading pain point”
The Senior Citizens League, an advocacy group for older Americans, says that the cost of food is a constant worry for more seniors.
Mary Johnson, a Social Security and Medicare policy analyst at the Senior Citizens League, said, “In our most recent survey, 63% said that food costs went up the most quickly in their household.” “This is up from last year, when 58% said that food costs were their fastest-growing category of spending.”
She also said, “Food was the main source of pain last year, too.”
The New York Federal Reserve Bank says that because of how they spend their money, families with lower incomes feel the effects of high grocery prices more than those with higher incomes.
Inflation was higher than average for low-income households because they spent more on food and housing, NY Fed economists wrote in a January blog post.
Since December, the bottom 40% of earners have been hit the hardest by inflation compared to other income groups, they said. And the pain could get worse next month, when a pandemic relief program ends and about 30 million people in 32 states lose more money from their food stamps.
Why are grocery prices so high?
There are a number of reasons why grocery prices are so high. These include problems in the supply chain, the avian flu epidemic, which is driving up the price of eggs, climate problems like drought, and the war in Ukraine, which has driven up the price of goods.
People complain about food prices on social media, saying that they don’t understand them and that it’s hard to fit them into their budgets as they keep going up.
Another popular idea, especially among lawmakers and policymakers who lean to the left, is that food producers may be raising prices just because they can. One group that keeps an eye on corporations has said that food companies and stores raised prices without reason because it was easier to do so when consumers were getting ready for inflation.
No matter what’s going on, there could be a small bit of relief on the way.
Food prices should go up more slowly in 2023 than they did in 2022. The U.S. Department of Agriculture predicts that grocery prices will go up by 8% this year.
That would be less than the 11.8% rise in grocery prices that happened in 2022. But it still means that people could pay almost 20% more for the same groceries at the end of 2023 than they did in 2021.
