US Gov Report: Grocery Prices Rising 5% Annually

mattduke · Intermediate Crude Joined: Oct 28, 2005 Posts: 919

5%.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus27apr27,1,4433493.column

emersonbiggins

Heh. Try 15%.
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Tyler_JC

cube · Fission Joined: Mar 12, 2005 Posts: 2502

The problem with trying to measure food inflation is that a lot of food manufactures are giving you less food and trying to sell it at the same price.......hoping you won't notice. Rolling Eyes

For example ice cream is no longer sold in half gallon, or at least the brand that I usually buy. If they give you 10% less food but raise the price by 5% ---> that does NOT count as 5% inflation. I think that's where these ridiculously low inflation numbers came from.

dorlomin · Intermediate Crude Joined: Aug 05, 2007 Posts: 660

Food prices may including things like cakes, ready meals and even fast food (not sure) but while there ingrediants prices are going up the wages, advertising, capital costs and rents and so on are not. The cost of a highly processed food is far greater than the cost of its inputs: so while wheat and corn go up, this pushes up the cost of meat and eggs it may not be as big a factor in the cost of TV dinner.

Also the full impact of transport cost increases may not have been passed on to the producer and then on to the consumer. Whats more some companies may be holding back on price increases this early in the inflationry period. So they may be making a loss or atleast less of a profit worried about losing customer to compition or just pricing them out of a market with little business confidence.

It will take time for the full impact of the recent inflation to work itself into the cost of goods and yet longer to work itself into wage demands.

The devil is in the details of what foods are in the basket.

Funnily enough two different UK forums, one with alot of working poor on it has had several threads about the cost of foods going up, another with a far more middle class orientation was very non plussed when I brought up food inflation. Different people are buying different things and have more flexible budgets.

vision-master

Bin-in-hers aka bananas have like almost doubled within the past year.

Roy