Recently on X, a “Mr. Pitbull” posted a photo of groceries that totaled $108, and asked in shock how this came to be the new normal in America. Some of the younger people I follow on X chimed in, saying they thought it was actually a reasonable bill for the items shown. I explained that the original poster didn’t mean, “This particular store is overcharging!” but rather, “How can it be that the cost of living has risen so much?” I argued it was a generational thing, not a complaint about particular items.
Inasmuch as I’m a professional economist who even specialized in monetary and banking theory, this is a rare occasion where I might have something useful to say to the average person. So let me try to document the problem (in this Part 1) and then offer some explanation of why it’s happening (in the follow-up Part 2).
Thirty Years of Food Price Inflation
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), their index of “Food Price at Home” stood at 151 thirty years ago in January 1996, whereas the latest figure in January 2026 stands at 318. Over the three decades, that’s a cumulative 110% increase—grocery food prices have more than doubled during the adult lifetimes of people in my age range.
Yet the reason grocery prices in particular seem to outrageous to many of us, is that the surge was concentrated in the post-COVID years, as the following chart indicates:
Specifically, in the bar chart above I’ve broken the thirty-year period into ten discrete buckets. From 2020-2023, the cumulative increase in grocery food prices was above 25%, which dwarfs any other three-year interval in the range we’re considering.
The takeaway? If you think grocery prices have risen dramatically, you’re not hallucinating.
Conclusion
In this post we’ve validated the perspective of old (medium?) timers like me, that grocery store prices have risen dramatically. In Part 2, I’ll give some theory and evidence as to why this has happened. Hint: It’s not “corporate greed”—among other reasons, corporations have presumably been greedy the entire time, and so can’t explain why they are able to raise prices consistently, year after year. In other words, something must be changing over time, to explain why the market price steadily rises. Next post, we’ll unpack what one major factor is.
Dr. Robert P. Murphy is the Chief Economist at infineo, bridging together the dependability of Whole Life insurance policies with the benefits of blockchain-based finance.
Twitter: @infineogroup, @BobMurphyEcon
Linkedin: infineo group, Robert Murphy
Youtube: infineo group
To learn more about infineo, please visit the infineo website