Shoppers rewire grocery routines while digesting the biggest price jump in 50 years - ABC News

Shoppers rewire grocery routines while digesting the biggest price jump in 50 years<br>Living through the biggest jump in grocery prices in a half-century has many Americans changing their eating and food shopping habits

ByDEE-ANN DURBIN Associated Press, TERRY TANG Associated Press, MAGGIE SCALES Associated Press, SANDY GUATIBONZA Associated Press, HIKARI MAE HIDA Associated Press, THE LEXINGTON OBSERVER Associated Press, LA ESQUINA Associated Press, and HONOLULU CIVIL BEAT Associated Press<br>July 25, 2026, 5:15 AM

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Lien Chang feeds her 2-year-old grandson Cairo Miu a bowl of rice next to his dad Jack Chang in her home on Monday, July 13, 2026, in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Juliana Yamada)<br>The Associated Press

What’s for dinner? Lately, at Apral Jack’s house, it’s whatever is on sale.<br>Jack scouts an app for deals at her local supermarket before she buys groceries. When she reaches the store, she grabs the weekly circular to look for coupons she might have missed. If the shelf prices look too high, she scratches items off her list or tries to find lower prices someplace else.<br>“The apples went up here, the ones I eat, so now I’m not going to get them here. I’ll go to Market Basket, where I can get them cheaper,” Jack, 50, said as she pushed a cart into a Stop & Shop near her home in Lexington, Massachusetts.<br>Couponing, comparison shopping and cutting back on favorite foods are new habits for her and millions of other Americans as they absorb the biggest jump in grocery prices in a half-century. Buying food to eat at home has gotten 33% more expensive in U.S. cities since the beginning of 2019, according to government figures. In the 7 1/2 years before that, prices rose 6.4%.<br>The historic increase happened for numerous reasons. The coronavirus pandemic snarled supply chains and raised labor and transportation costs. Droughts, hurricanes and diseases like bird flu drove down production. Tariffs raised prices on foreign products like coffee, tomatoes and chocolate. Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine disrupted oil and fertilizer supplies.

With a fresh conflict in the Middle East accelerating food price inflation again this year, the cost of filling their refrigerators, freezers and pantries has become a frustration for Americans and made affordability a central issue in the fall midterm elections.<br>By some measures, Americans are better equipped to handle the higher prices, if only slightly. The average weekly earnings of people with full-time jobs job have gone up a bit faster than the cost of groceries since 2019, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.<br>But consumers have long memories when it comes to food shopping, and they know their dollars aren’t going as far as they used to, said Jared Bernstein, a senior policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy.<br>Wages grew much more quickly than grocery prices before the pandemic, Bernstein said. Even if a typical worker's paycheck still outpaces supermarket receipts by a small margin, consumers may feel stressed and aggrieved because other costs, like housing and electricity, have climbed significantly as well, he said.<br>“People have a well-honed sense of those prices, just as much as gas and maybe more so,” Bernstein, who served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under former President Joe Biden, said. “You need groceries to live.”

An economic indicator like median wages does not capture the capacity of family budgets to accommodate additional price hikes. Americans spent an average of 12.9% of their pretax incomes on eating out and at home in 2024, but the share was 33% for the one-fifth of U.S. households with the lowest earnings, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.<br>Prices also can vary substantially by region. In St. Louis, food for home use cost 2% more in June compared to a year earlier; in San Francisco, it was 6%, the consumer price index showed.<br>In interviews, residents of four urban areas where food price inflation has exceeded the national average shared how steadily rising prices are changing the way they shop. They described hunting for discounts, switching brands and feeling grateful for food banks. Some are more cautious about buying nonessentials like takeout coffee. Others are buying less meat or less food overall.<br>“It’s almost like a strategy, a household strategy, where financial pressure just hasn’t disappeared, so consumers are really developing their own playbook on how to navigate it,” said Sally Lyons Wyatt, a global executive vice president at market research company Circana.<br>Beef epitomizes out-of-control grocery prices for many Americans. The price of a pound of ground beef reached $6.82 in June, which is 79% more than at the beginning of 2019, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Contributing factors include a shrinking U.S. cattle herd, drought in the West, and the costs of...