Economist Writing Every Day

Grocery prices are definitely up a lot in the past few years. I’ve wrote about this several times before. But lately there has been a trend on social media to “post your receipts” and show how much your grocery prices have gone up. Unfortunately, very few people actually post the full receipts, often just showing the total, which leads to wild claims like prices being up 250% in just the past 2 years! That’s a huge contrast to BLS “food at home” category of the CPI, which shows an increase of 4.7% from July 2022 to July 2024 (it’s also unclear in the video what the exact date of the receipt is, he just says “2 years”). Depending on the exact base month, you’re going to be in the 20-25% compared with pre-pandemic or early pandemic using BLS data.

What if we actually looked at receipts? I tried such an exercise in November 2023, when there was another round of social media videos claiming prices had doubled in just a single year. My own personal receipt matched the corresponding BLS data pretty closely, but that was just one receipt with only eight items from Sam’s Club (which might not match grocery stores, for various reasons). At the time, I couldn’t find any good receipts from 2019 or 2020 (Kroger and Walmart drop old receipts in your account after about 2 years), but after scouring an old email account, I discovered two more receipts to compare. These are both from Walmart, in 2019 and 2020, and they contain a larger number of items than my Sam’s Club receipt (each with about a dozen and half items that are fairly typical grocery purchases, and I was able to find matching products today).

I present… the receipts!

October 2019

First is a Walmart receipt from October 2019. Here’s the original receipt (click!), and here’s my repurchase of most of the grocery items this week (August 2024). There were a small number of non-food items (like plastic forks) that I couldn’t find exact substitutes for, so for the purposes of this exercise I only used food items (the non-food stuff was small potatoes).

My comparison of the October 2019 receipt is in the following table:

I was able to find most of the items, almost always the exact same brand! I even double checked all of the package sizes, to account for shrinkflation. There were two items (both cheeses) that had slightly smaller packages, so I accounted for this in the “shrinkflation adjusted” line. Some items, of course, are up quite a bit, like the eye-popping 171.4% for eggs. If you anchor on egg prices, or if you just really like eggs, this could be why you think that grocery prices have doubled or whatever. But that’s the outlier.

Notice that a few prices have fallen! One is green grapes, which fell by 20%. This could be a seasonal effect (I’ll check the price again in late October), but even if we drop grapes from the analysis, it doesn’t really change the picture (total increase would be 23.8% and shrinkflation-adjusted would be 25.5%). There was also a small coupon on yogurt I didn’t use in the calculation (but I could have).

Notice that for the October 2019 comparison, BLS says grocery prices are up 26.4%. My receipt has gone up by less than that! Even using the shrinkflation-adjusted prices and dropping the grapes outlier, my receipt was still a percentage point lower. But whichever figure we use, it’s basically in the ballpark. Somewhere in the range of 20-25%. Not 100% or more!

Here’s a chart with the BLS “food at home” component since October 2019, along with average wages for comparison.

October 2020

For October 2020, once again here’s the original receipt (click!), and here’s my repurchase this week (August 2024).

And my comparison:

Some prices are up a lot! Like Jell-O. But my frozen veggies have no inflation (I couldn’t find one grocery item, Green Giant Honey Roasted Sweet Corn). Also, our Crystal Light Strawberry Lemonade is out of stock, so it would be shipped by a third-party vendor and thus costs a lot more — but if I’m happy to get the regular lemonade it is in stock, and the exact same price as October 2020 (no inflation again!). If I once again drop the unusual decrease for grapes (maybe a seasonal issue), but also get the regular lemonade, the overall total increase 23.4%. That’s slightly more than BLS reports at 21.6% for this period, but… very much in the ballpark. The 20-25% rule of thumb works again.

Here’s the chart of grocery prices since October 2020, along with average wages:

Show Me The Receipts!

As with my prior post on the topic, some people might be skeptical that my receipts are cherry picked in some way, or just a weird outlier (order was too small? Not enough meat? Arkansas is different?). Fine! I once again invite people to provide their receipts with their own personal anecdotes. No one took me up last time (that I know of). But until I see a good number of personal anecdotes that show something radically different, I’ll continue to believe that the BLS data is basically representative of the typical US consumer.

Of course, my anecdotes and even dozens of more anecdotes can’t prove that the BLS data is correct. But when people ask me “Do you really believe the government data?” my response is yes for two reasons. First, as you can see in this post, it very much aligns with my personal experience. Second, despite my generally libertarian leanings, I generally believe that government data in the US is high quality, both compared to other countries and private sources. So that’s putting my bias on the table, which is for a lot of reasons, not least of which is that I worked for a time for the state LMIC shop in South Dakota, which works closely with BLS to produce labor market data.

I look forward to seeing everyone else’s receipts.