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We're starting at the grocery store and we're going to need some extra cash. In the month of April, the price of groceries grew 2.6% according to the U.S. Labor Department. So if a family spent $1,000 on groceries in March, they would have needed an extra $26 for those same groceries in April. The 2.6% increase was the biggest jump from one month to the next since 1974. You can guess why this happened. It's another side effect, really a series of them, to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
When restaurants shutdown and businesses closed, more Americans started cooking at home. So demand for groceries went up but then many food producers and farmers had trouble quickly shifting their deliveries from those restaurants to grocery stores. It's a very complex process. And there've been outbreaks of COVID-19 in some food processing plants forcing some of them to shut down. So there's this perfect storm of increase demand, jarring changes in delivery and reduced supply. But on top of all that some shoppers started panic buying, picking up lots of food that they didn't plan to eat right away.
So to keep certain groceries in stock, stores put limits on the amounts people could buy. They've also raised prices to discourage people from buying so much and to recover some of the extra money they've had to pay to suppliers. Meat, eggs, bread, cereal, soup, soda, fruit and coffee, all went up in April. Some prices went down though. Ham, breakfast sausage, butter, prepared salads and cupcakes got cheaper.
