As the inaugural post on my blog, I’ll start with a little background. In my house, I handle the food shopping and the cooking for me and my husband. We’re not rich by any means, but we live relatively comfortable. It helps that we live in a pretty low cost of living area. I have been noticing a sharp upward trend in grocery prices recently. I don’t have a strict food budget, but I know I’m paying more and more for the same products and that prices are going up just about every week or two.
I’m also relatively well read on politics, economics, and current events. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics, in its latest calculations, states that overall food prices have risen 3.4% over the last year, and 4.4% for food in home (as opposed to restaurant prices). According to their website, they compile these numbers based on surveys about spending from a representative sample of households across the country. I wish they’d include my household because the trends I’m seeing suggest a rise much steeper than 4.4% for the year. I kind of think the BLS numbers are a crock of shit. (I think it’s an even bigger crock of shit that the so-called “core” inflation numbers exclude food an energy, especially since those are taking up more and more of average American budgets, but that’s a can of worms for another time.)
Coming full circle, I went food shopping yesterday. Living in the Pacific Northwest and being somewhat budget-conscious, I shop at retailers like Winco (allows me to buy many items by the pound), Costco, and occasionally Safeway if they have a good sale. I don’t coupon because most of the food we buy does not have coupons and I found the time it took to actually cut the damn things out or find them on the internet was taking too much time away from me being otherwise productive around the house or with my work I should be doing for grad school. In other words, a cost/benefit analysis I briefly conducted in my head told me that there’s no fucking way I’ll ever have the patience to coupon effectively. That being said, I am price conscious. I remember prices. I compare price per ounce on different sized items.
I have been noticing an alarming trend. Products are shedding actual product while cost is increasing. This is something that is not captured in the BLS inflation statistics. One can of tuna may have risen from $0.46 to $0.68 in the last year (for the store-brand crap), but the cans have at least 2 fewer ounces than they did about 2 years ago. The BLS only captures the cost of a can of tuna, a bag of chips, a container of orange juice. I can’t really blame manufacturers, afterall, costs are up across the board. That gets passed to us. But if you’re going through food a little faster than this time last year, the smaller packages are probably contributing to that. I will say one thing, manufacturers are really sneaky about the smaller sizes. The packages might say something like, “New look, same great taste”, which in FDA terms absolves them of potential lawsuits because they’ve alerted consumers that something is different, but they don’t really tell you what. Start looking for shallower bottoms on cans, deeper dimples on the bottom of 2-liter bottles of soda, smaller OJ cartons, etc.
During my shopping trip to Winco yesterday, I picked out a flavor of coffee that I wanted, conscious not to fill the entire two pound bag like I used to now that the coffee costs $7.88/lb up from $5.97 last summer. I grabbed American cheese, skipped over eggs that are roughly double last summer’s price- we get fresh eggs from Chris’s parents, and went to grab my favorite burger topper- Claussen sandwich stackers. I had recently paid $2.18 for a jar of them, but was running low. We make a lot of burgers in the summer. Also, I fucking love pickles. A jar of Claussen pickles was up to $3.20. $3.20!! No. Fucking. Way. My panties sufficiently bunched, I decided that I will be taking pictures of products and prices and keeping receipts so I can make giant, nerdy spreadsheets to track price increases in my favorite products. And I decided to keep a blog of my shopping experiences. I also decided that there will be no more willy-nilly pickle usage now that they want to charge me $3.20 for a jar of those suckers.
I cut a pickle in half for my burger tonight. I should have made a frowny face with the mustard.
Welcome to “I paid WHAT?”.
I paid WHAT? 