Grocery prices have surged 33% in U.S. cities since the start of 2019 — the biggest jump in a half-century — and working Americans are permanently changing how they feed their families because of it.
That matters because food isn't discretionary. When the lowest-earning fifth of U.S. households spend a third of their pretax income just to eat, and ground beef costs 79% more than it did five years ago — hitting $6.82 a pound in June — we're not talking about belt-tightening. We're talking about a structural squeeze on the people who can least absorb it.
All three outlets covering this story — the Boston Globe, WTOP, and AP News — agree on the core numbers. They also share the same framing: the causes are listed as pandemic supply chain snarls, weather events, bird flu, tariffs, and foreign wars. Presented as forces of nature. What's missing is policy. The Fed printed trillions. Congress spent trillions more. Tariffs are a policy choice, not a weather event. Foreign wars that disrupt energy and fertilizer markets don't happen in a vacuum — and Washington's role in them is a choice too.
The result is visible on Main Street. Apral Jack, 50, of Lexington, Massachusetts, now scouts apps for deals before she shops and grabs weekly circulars for coupons she might have missed. "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," she told AP News. Others described switching brands, hunting discounts, relying on food banks, and buying less food overall. Sally Lyons Wyatt, a global executive vice president at market research firm Circana, called it "a household strategy, where financial pressure just hasn't disappeared, so consumers are really developing their own playbook on how to navigate it."
Then there's the DC spin. All three outlets note that average weekly earnings for full-time workers have gone up "a bit faster" than grocery costs since 2019 — as though that settles it. Jared Bernstein, who served as chair of Biden's Council of Economic Advisers and is now at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy, acknowledged that wages grew "much more quickly" than grocery prices before the pandemic, and that housing and electricity costs have climbed significantly too. "People have a well-honed sense of those prices, just as much as gas and maybe more so," Bernstein said. "You need groceries to live."
Translation from Beltway-speak: the aggregate data looks okay, so the people hurting must be imagining it. But the USDA's own numbers show the gap — the average household spent 12.9% of pretax income on food in 2024, while the bottom fifth spent 33%. Median wages don't capture what families actually face when rent and power bills are eating the rest.
A fresh Middle East conflict is now accelerating food inflation again, and affordability has become a central issue in the fall midterms. Prices vary by region too — St. Louis saw a 2% year-over-year increase in June; San Francisco hit 6%.
The people writing the checks in Washington called this inflation "transitory." It wasn't. It was a predictable consequence of policy — monetary, fiscal, and foreign. And the people paying for it at the checkout line are still waiting for someone in DC to own it.
