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Grocery prices have jumped up, and there's no relief in sight
- bix6 1y ago> Avian flu added to the more recent spike in egg prices There’s some fascinating writing on this. It’s really private equity causing the price increases through supply chain control.
- OutOfHere 1y agoI think the best non-governmental solution to handling private equity is to take money out of equities and to put it into precious metals and cryptocurrency. In effect it is to take money out of the private-equity controlled dollar system, devaluing their equities. Unfortunately for now, mutual funds, which hold a lot of retirement funds, probably don't support those alternative assets yet.
- georgemcbay 1y ago> and cryptocurrency Shifting things from one scam economy (private equity) to another (cryptocurrency).
- OutOfHere 1y agoSelf-custodied cryptocurrency, if limited to the subset below, using an offline cold wallet, is not scammy at all; it is exactly the opposite, presenting less risk even than a bank account. Note that there are just a handful of cryptocurrencies that have seen constant appreciation after adjusting for noise. These are: BTC, ETH, XMR, TRX, PAXG, BNB.
- josefritzishere 1y agoIt's almost like tariffs were a bad idea.
- krapp 1y agoIf only nearly everyone, everywhere had seen this coming...
- nxm 1y agoU.S. food prices rose by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024.
- LeafItAlone 1y ago> U.S. food prices rose by 23.6 percent from 2020 to 2024. After historic food price roses during a global pandemic and another round of bird flu in four years, you’d think a good president would do things to lower them, not continue to increase them!
- georgemcbay 1y agoThat and causing massive sudden disruption within the domestic agricultural labor pool. I'm sure that somehow this is all Biden's fault though.
- macinjosh 1y agoby labor pool you mean foreign labor paid under the table at slave wages w/o benefits or tax collection who meanwhile use US ERs as primary care doctors and US schools to feed and watch their kids for them.
- onedognight 1y agoIf the employees are being paid under the table, they would mean the employers were committing an obvious crime opening the employer to extortion. However, if the employees were Using fake social security numbers, then it would give the employers the benefit of the doubt. It also would mean the employees do pay takes, collected by their employers. From what I’ve heard, the latter is most common.
- georgemcbay 1y ago
- ivewonyoung 1y agoNot even a passing mention of all the money printing that at least could have had an effect on inflation?
- HankStallone 1y agoNo, because that started before 2025.
- potato3732842 1y agoThe money printing started before then too.
- spicyusername 1y agoThe article is about the cost increase since 2020.
- hobs 1y agoIt's literally reported right in the top "Up 29% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics." And later "Coffee prices have jumped more than 20% in the last year. And while some of that is due to weather in coffee-growing countries like Brazil and Vietnam, Trump's double-digit import taxes are not helping." if you want to pretend that your boy had nothing to do with it (because global trade wars have nothing to do with rising prices.)
- vladimirralev 1y agoI am fascinated your comment is buried down here with absolutely no discussion. Money printing is undoubtedly the biggest factor in this particular inflation spike, but something is quietly steering the narrative away from it almost everywhere. While the question of alternative actions and outcomes is also valid, this is a literal 10-trillion dollar question that nobody in a leadership position wants to ask or answer.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoToo much monopoly in the food industry, trade wars hurting farmers, there are so many problems..
- josu 1y agoThe monetary base expanded (aka "they printed a ton of money") between 2020-2022, so there were 2 options: the monetary base had to contract again, or the prices needed to adjust.
- SubiculumCode 1y agoThat is too simplistic.
- josu 1y agoSimple is good.
- pessimizer 1y agoWe're also heading for a crash because we invested in financial scams rather than infrastructure that would allow us to make groceries cheaper. But this is just a submarine anti-Trump piece. Everybody knows that groceries are expensive and why. The idea that annualized inflation rising to 2.9% in October when it was 3.0% in January is a huge failure for Trump is silly when he's actively pursuing policies that are expected to raise prices (tariffs and the deportation of workers that have no rights and are paid trash.) Trump's failure is that he's simultaneously trying to cut the social safety net because he's a dumb libertarian at heart, surrounded by dumb libertarians, who engineer policy to serve their plutocrat sponsors (who aren't dumb libertarians) whims. They convinced him that he could get rid of the enormous number of illegal aliens to create a wage renaissance without spending a dime, but they aren't easy to get rid of. They're here, and they don't have anywhere else to go because we fucked up their countries. In fact, he's still fucking up their countries because he serves the people he golfs with. Even if you warehouse the illegals, all that's doing is keeping them from feeding themselves, and making them an even larger weight on the citizen economy. He even knows that most of them will have to be made citizens. At least the gate is closed for now. He needs to put price controls on necessities hard, and start doing stimulus checks so hard that it looks like UBI. His goal is to lower the dollar anyway, print a ton of them and don't give them to the wealthiest people in the country who don't spend (or who "spend" on trash like the metaverse and AI being anything like AGI.) By that, I mean be better than Obama. People will forget that you reigned over the completion of a genocide in the holy land, and remember that you saved the West.
- asah 1y agoHunh? Nowhere to go? They're happy to deport regardless.
- blurbleblurble 1y agoThe west is a fear driven fantasy, an escape from deeply rooted insecurities, multi-generational. I urge you too shake that off before we collectively go there again.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bluedino 1y agoIt's weird how certain things have remained the same, or even cheaper when accounting for inflation. I've bought an $899 MacBook Air. I've bought a $229 65" TV. $20 handheld emulator. A lot of tools and random things from Amazon are still the same price. But the house I bought was double what the one was in 2018. The car I haven't bought would be up 50%. Insurance costs are way up. Phone bill is the same. Groceries are way up in general, certain things like meat basically doubled but Yogurt and cheese is still about the same price. Junk food like soda, cookies, and chips are double (thankfully I don't buy much). Potatoes, onions, peppers are still the same price.
- csomar 1y agoThe stuff you mentioned that remained cheap is coming from China/Asia. It is in fact getting cheaper than ever for electronics.
- jalapenod 1y ago[dead]
- mandeepj 1y agoiPhone is screaming: Hello, ahem, I was priced $499 in 2007 and $1100 now
- cjbgkagh 1y agoThere has been a marked quality improvement, it’s not apples to apples
- SirFatty 1y agoOk.. so $499 was too much back in 2007.
- etrautmann 1y agoWith 2% target inflation prices double every 17 years, so that’s not too far off.
- cbradford 1y agoA little late on this story, it all happened last year and the years before. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, when the govt floods the world with free money, the price of goods goes up.
- aaa_aaa 1y agoGet ready for statist backlash.
- GeoAtreides 1y agoSlowly, global warming will take its toll. There won't be one big disaster, one big crash leading to global famine, but crops failing more and more, constantly, removing first the luxuries (cacao, olives, fruits, etc) and then the staples.
- jauntywundrkind 1y agoAnd other non-food related slow-catastrophes. From William Gibson's The Peripheral, on The Jackpot: > nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.
- blipvert 1y agoLikely it will mirror Hemingway’s quote about how someone went bankrupt: Gradually, then suddenly.
- DengistKhan 1y agoDon't underestimate how much they're willing to stick with cash crops knowing that you're starving.
- spwa4 1y agoWhy? If there's one positive it's that global warming is giving us vastly increased amounts of farmland, and in the north and the south (the most productive countries on the planet) Worldwide even. This seems to me unlikely to lead to famine. We'll need to adapt, because farmland is moving, but we'll have a lot more food, not less.
- bmartin13 1y agoUsing words like "jumped" in headlines exactly why NPR is continuing to lose public trust. The data is super easy to find. CPI rose slightly last month, and the overall trend looks to have stabilized. I believe the FED targets for ~ 3% inflation. https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-price-index-by-category-line-chart.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/consumer-price-index/consumer-pri...
- cd4plus 1y agoAm I missing something or are they reporting that prices have "jumped" because they've increased 30% since 2020? That seems like a fair use of the word.
- spicyusername 1y agoThe article is compared prices to 2020.
- etrautmann 1y agoFed targets 2%, which is very very different from 3%.
- piva00 1y agoNPR is losing public trust because there's a concerted effort to make the American public distrust any kind of news media. You are just a victim of that, it's unfortunate because given your comment history it will be really hard for anyone on Earth to pull you out of that deep pit of distrust you fell into.
- mfer 1y agoThere is a lot missing from the articles on this whole space. The farmers are getting squeezed for things like profits. For example... 1. Seed prices - there is a lot of patented GMO stuff in circulation and pricing around that. 2. Farm equipment - bigger equipment, more sensors and computers, higher costs (even around fixing things) It would be great if there was some investigative reporting that covered all the angles.
- foogazi 1y ago> Farm equipment - bigger equipment, more sensors and computers The alternative is to keep using the same equipment + manual labor
- conorcleary 1y agoBoth need to happen worldwide to be sustainable long-term; mobility and load balancing are important.
- jeffbee 1y agoFarmers are getting squeezed by $4 wheat and the elimination of the sole buyer of their worthless sorghum crop.
- positr0n 1y agoThe original seeds and farm equipment still exist for the most part. Farmers use GMO patented seeds and no-right-to-repair complex farm equipment "systems" because they're more efficient despite the downsides.
- conorcleary 1y agoor they're the only option, or affordable option (by design). Capitalism is horrid for food security.
- y-curious 1y agoThe one thing I get from these articles, as I suspect the majority of tech workers on here feel, is that I'm grateful for this to not affect me. I have always shopped for sale items, but I've never had to go to several grocery stores to get the best deal. I've never had to choose a cheap spaghetti meal (since college, anyways) because of price. I'm grateful for this
- delichon 1y agoSave as if it did matter, because your advantage could disappear in a blink. If not from a world wide trend, then from a microscopic blockage in a capillary. I wish I had.
- georgemcbay 1y agoI think I get the gist of what you're saying and I'm also grateful that I'm doing ok, but rapidly rising incoming equality is already impacting many tech workers and a larger and larger percentage of the former middle class will be underwater in the coming years since nobody with the power to do anything is making any real effort to fix the underlying problems.
- abnercoimbre 1y agoAnd this may not be the case for GP, but tech workers (especially programmers) aren’t particularly social creatures and they miss the signs of upheaval. Important things will affect you badly with or without a good income
- foogazi 1y agoWhen I got laid off 2 years back it was shocking how quickly I burned down savings because I had really high consumption habit Been saving more since I found another job
- OnionBlender 1y agoWhat were you spending your money on that you considered high consumption?
- voidmain0001 1y agoI listened to Planet Money from NPR in August[0] where it claimed that inflation was based on feeling rather than data. The summary was that groceries are not a good measure of inflation since they're seasonal and the best way to buy groceries was the same as dollar cost averaging investment - buy the groceries when you need them and the prices will average out. [0] https://www.npr.org/2025/08/15/nx-s1-5500523/when-our-inflation-infeelings-dont-match-the-cpi https://www.npr.org/2025/08/15/nx-s1-5500523/when-our-inflat...
- foogazi 1y agoeven after adjusting for seasonality inflation can be detected It’s just that you can’t track it by the price of oranges week to week
- ajay-b 1y agoI think this has less to do with policy and more to do with grocery economics: They will raise prices until the public stops buying - basic economics. They've raised the prices and have zero incentive to reduce them. What are you going to do, grow your own food? Buy local?