Ariane Navarro thinks so. She recently pulled up her budgeting spreadsheets from 2021 and was shocked by how much her family's grocery bill has skyrocketed.
There's no dispute that food sellers and manufacturers have passed costs on to consumers; they typically do, to varying degrees. And their costs increased substantially from the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Companies' financial disclosures cover global operations, meaning lots of variety in costs and prices. But for almost all companies that NPR analyzed, between 2018 and 2023 the margins either declined or grew less than 1%.This company data doesn't offer a satisfying explanation for why families like Navarro's are finding their grocery budgets stretched by pricier meat and snacks., which tracks total sales and most operating costs.
Economist Ernie Tedeschi has sliced this data another way to draw a contrast between grocers and other types of retailers. Until March, Tedeschi was the chief economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He wanted to track how much grocers' income has outpaced increases in their costs — what he calls a markup above costs."Grocery was different" from the rest of retail, Tedeschi said.