Americans Change How They Shop and Eat as Grocery Prices Climb 33% Since 2019
For Apral Jack, deciding what is for dinner now begins with one question: What is on sale?
Before visiting the supermarket, the 50-year-old Massachusetts resident checks a store app for discounts. Once inside, she scans the weekly circular for coupons, removes costly products from her list and considers whether another store has a better price.
“The apples went up here, the ones I eat, so now I’m not going to get them here,” Jack said while shopping at a Stop & Shop near her Lexington home. “I’ll go to Market Basket, where I can get them cheaper.”
Couponing, comparison shopping and cutting back on favorite foods have become routine for millions of Americans confronting the largest increase in grocery costs in roughly half a century.
Food purchased for home consumption has become 33% more expensive in U.S. cities since the beginning of 2019, according to government data. During the previous 7½ years, prices increased just 6.4%.
Food-at-home prices remained 2.7% higher in June than they were a year earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the South, prices also increased across five of the six major grocery categories.
Families Develop New Grocery Shopping Strategies
The increase stems from several overlapping disruptions. The COVID-19 pandemic strained supply chains and increased transportation and labor expenses. Drought, hurricanes and bird flu reduced production, while tariffs raised costs for imported coffee, tomatoes and chocolate.
Russia’s war in Ukraine disrupted oil and fertilizer supplies, and renewed conflict in the Middle East has added pressure to fuel, transportation and food costs.
Although average weekly earnings for full-time workers have risen slightly faster than grocery prices since 2019, many families still feel squeezed by higher housing, electricity and other living expenses.
“People have a well-honed sense of those prices, just as much as gas and maybe more so,” said Jared Bernstein, a senior policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy and former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “You need groceries to live.”
The pressure is especially severe for lower-income households. Americans spent an average of 12.9% of their pretax income on food at home and away from home in 2024. That share reached 33% among the lowest-earning fifth of U.S. households, according to the Department of Agriculture.
Consumers are responding by building individual strategies around discounts, store brands and reduced portions.
“It’s almost like a strategy, a household strategy, where financial pressure just hasn’t disappeared,” said Sally Lyons Wyatt, a global executive vice president at market research company Circana. “Consumers are really developing their own playbook on how to navigate it.”
Texas Family Treats Beef as a Luxury
Few products illustrate the increase more clearly than beef.
A pound of ground beef cost an average of $6.82 in June, up 79% from the beginning of 2019. A smaller cattle herd, drought, feed expenses and fuel costs have all contributed to the increase.
For Ada Torres and her family in Cleveland, Texas, about 45 miles northeast of Houston, beef is no longer an everyday purchase.
Torres, 60, lives with her adult daughter and three grandchildren. Her daughter works for a mobile car-washing service and serves as the household’s primary provider, while Torres handles the cooking and grocery shopping.
“Prices are sky-high,” Torres said. “One hundred dollars’ worth of groceries these days is nothing. Maybe you can bring home seven family-size items, if you manage to find a good deal.”
Torres substitutes Walmart’s Great Value beans and tomato sauce for name-brand products. Chicken and cold cuts have replaced much of the family’s beef, though she worries about serving her grandchildren too much processed meat.
The family misses meals that once appeared regularly on the table, including beef lasagna, fajitas and steak with plantain chips.
During Texas’ rainy season, her daughter receives fewer car-washing jobs. At those times, the family can afford only one complete meal each day. Breakfast and dinner may consist of eggs or generic cereal.
Shoppers Sacrifice Brands, Meat and Local Food
Outside Boston, Jack plans weekly meals around digital coupons and short-term promotions. A chicken sale might lead to chicken fajitas with vegetables and rice.
She buys steak only when it is discounted and has stopped purchasing Nabisco Ginger Snaps and Nilla Wafers because of their prices. Store-brand versions are cheaper, but Jack said they do not taste the same.
In San Francisco, self-employed barber Jack Chang supports his unemployed partner, three young children and, at times, his mother. The family buys generic food and medicine, accepts leftover meals from a child’s preschool and relies on federal food assistance.
“Without that, I don’t know what I would do,” Chang said.
His 77-year-old mother also receives Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and visits two food banks each week. She shares canned food, eggs and produce with the family.
“But I try to be optimistic and do what I have to do in order to support my family,” Chang said. “Failure is not an option for me.”
In Hawaii, pastry chef Amanda Tabadero has stopped buying some locally grown ingredients because they have become too expensive.
Maui-grown berries that cost $7.99 per pound in 2024 now sell for about $11, she said. Tabadero instead buys less expensive berries grown in California or Mexico. Milk can cost $9 per gallon, while chuck roast for Hawaii-style beef stew has climbed to roughly $10 per pound.
“It makes me sad,” Tabadero said. “I want to use local stuff.”
Across the country, families are making similar calculations. They are visiting multiple stores, changing recipes and giving up products that once felt routine.
The inflation rate may rise or fall from month to month, but at the dinner table, many Americans continue to feel the lasting cost of years of higher grocery prices.
