Yes, Thanksgiving Dinner Did Cost More

Biden claims this year’s Thanksgiving dinner was the 4^th cheapest ever. (It is maybe the 4^th cheapest of his 3-year presidency). But facts are hard things to deny, and we’re all facing facts every time we go to a grocery store.

Thanksgiving dinner tasted great, whatever it cost this year.

On his Wednesday night program, Glenn Beck said, “No matter how hard the government tries to gaslight, these things we know. We experience them every day.” 

Beck listed a number of items, and the percentages or amounts they have risen during the Biden presidency:

·        Airfare up 25%

·        House purchase price up 42%

·        Mortgage rates up 4%

·        Rent up 24%

·        Water up 16%

·        Electricity up 25%

·        Electricity in California up 51%

·        Major appliances up 12%

·        Natural gas up 29%

·        Used cars up 35%

·        Car insurance up 33%

·        Gasoline up from $1.80/gal to $3.00/gal

·        Big Mac combo meal $10.00

·        Restaurant food up 24%

·        Ground beef up $2.00

·        Coffee up $2.00

·        Fruits and Vegetables up 14%

·        Dog and cat food up 17%

He compared the weekly grocery bills:

·        2020 $238/week on groceries

·        2023 $315/week on groceries

So groceries overall are up 25%.

Glenn Beck went over some rising prices on his chalkboard,
November 29, 2023, screenshot from here
(also on YouTube here)

That seems to be about what I’m experiencing, but I wondered whether there was data beyond my gut feeling.

It so happened that last week, during the three days before Thanksgiving, without my usual assignments, I cleaned and cooked like crazy. I even took care of the jar where I stuff my grocery receipts (in case I need the receipts later). I hadn’t cleared that out in quite a while—it turned out, more than a year. I had thrown away some from time to time, but there were quite a few there. Since some of our trips to Sam’s Club this year surpassed $400, I wondered if I might see what really happened. So I organized the receipts by store and date and put them in a bag, to look at later.

When Glenn Beck talked about grocery prices rising on his Wednesday night show, I thought, what better time than now to go through those receipts. So I spent some time putting them on a chart and doing some math.

The way I shop is pretty regular—so regular that I have printed up grocery lists, arranged by how I walk through Kroger (weekly) and Sam’s Club (every other week), so I just have to highlight what I want that week, and check them off as I go through the store. In other words, I buy the same stuff over and over. I don’t buy vegetables that I let die in the fridge (except sometimes cilantro, which doesn’t last long, if I don’t get around to making pico de gallo). I eat vegetables regularly. We have a routine, and not a lot of waste. Our pantry is pretty well stocked, and so is our freezer.

The point is, I can compare many of the same items over time.

It also happened that I came across a couple of receipts, stuck behind some cookbooks, from February and March of 2020—just before the shutdown that so badly messed with a thriving economy. Those were shorter trips to Sam’s Club, with only a few items. But I can compare those to the same items today.

A few items have stayed essentially the same:

·        Almond milk up 0% from 2020

·        Canadian bacon up 0% from 2022

·        Sweet potatoes up 0% from 2022

·        Toilet paper up 0% from 2022

·        Mixed nuts up 2% from 2022

·        Romaine lettuce up 3% from 2022

·        Tomatoes down 2% from 2022

Vanilla went down, by 45% from 2020. We were, back then, dealing with a sharp rise in vanilla prices (related to a shortage I’m assuming) that has since subsided.

But many items went up significantly:

·        Avocadoes up 39% from 2020 (45 months: .87%/month)

·        Baby carrots up 46% from 2022 (12 months: 3.83%/month)

·        Frozen chicken tenderloins up 36% from early 2023 (10 months: 3.6%/month)

·        Clementines (small easy peel oranges) up 43% from 2020 (45 months: .96%/month)

·        Navel oranges up 35% from 2020 (45 months: .78%/month)

·        M&M peanuts up 46% from 2020 (45 months: 1.02%/month)

·        Raisins up 9% from 2020 (45 months: .2%/month)

·        Strawberries up 26% from 2020 (45 months: .58%/month)

I was trying to find a way to measure general prices. So I looked at the number of items and divided that into the cost for that shopping trip for an average price per item. I then divided these into manageable time periods and averaged the cost per item for those periods.

Sam’s Club cost per item:

·        Sam’s Club 2020: $7.32

·        Sam’s Club 2022: $9.03

·        Sam’s Club 2023 first half: $10.21

·        Sam’s Club 2023 second half: $10.59

Sam’s Club cost per item is up 45% from early 2020 (45 months: 1%/month).

Kroger cost per item:

·        Kroger 2023 first quarter: $3.98

·        Kroger 2023 second quarter: $4.31

·        Kroger 2023 third quarter: $4.63

·        Kroger 2023 fourth quarter: $4.61

Kroger cost per item is up 16% from the first quarter this year (8 months: 2%/month).

So, I’m convinced I haven’t been imagining it; prices are rising (while our income is not). I don’t know what Biden is imagining, but it isn’t related to hard reality.

 

 

Security Limits Opportunity

Real life is an untidy, somewhat chaotic thing. And economics is part of real life.

For example, we’re a couple of weeks since the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In the wake of that, many companies have offered bonuses to the employees and other investments in the business. Among them, Walmart this week announced raising their starting wage to $11 an hour, which is more than $3 above the national minimum wage.

No law was required to force them to do this. The free market did it. Entry workers are in short supply, so much so that they need to offer more money to entice the workers of the level they want. That’s a good thing for every entry-level worker willing to do the work Walmart wants done.

One of the Sam's Club locations closed in Houston
image from KHOU

But then, this morning, without prior warning, the Walmart corporation closed about 100 Sam’s Club 

locations across the country. Sam’s Club, if you’re not familiar, is the big box store branch of Walmart. It requires a membership fee, and quantities and sizes of products tend to be large. But prices are typically better than you can get elsewhere. Three of these closed stores were in and near Houston.

When I heard the news, I immediately went to the internet to find out if our nearby store was among them, and breathed a sigh of relief. The closed ones are far away enough that I’ve never been to them.

But employees weren’t even given a heads up. The announcement apparently went out overnight. The company explains,

After a thorough review of our existing portfolio, we’ve decided to close a series of clubs and better align our locations with our strategy. Closing clubs is never easy and we’re committed to working with impacted members and associates through this transition.

The suddenness seems harsh. But employees will get pay for next 60 days and are eligible to apply for transfers to other Sam’s Club locations or Walmart stores.

If you see the sudden upheaval that these employees face —the untidy chaos—as a problem that needs to be solved, you might forget that the free market solves this “problem” better than government or any other way.

In France there are guarantees that you can’t lose your job for life. That’s security. But there are steep costs for that, in money and freedom. I met an exchange student during recent travels. She was studying here to avoid, or postpone, some requirements from her high school in France. She was expected, by age 16, to have decided on her life’s work. From that point on, all education and opportunities would be limited to that decision—assuming she qualified for her choice. She would have a job waiting for her after graduation, but no opportunity to change her career once she realized, at age 19 or 23, that what she loved at 16 didn’t still interest her or fit who she grew up to be.

That kind of limitation might work for people who are raised from birth to believe job security is everything, and choice and flexibility are overrated. But here in America, that kind of control over life choices bristles with tyranny. And we won’t stand for it.

Does that mean we don’t care about workers at Sam’s Club who just lost their jobs? Of course we care. But the solution is in the market. We know—and it’s also evidenced by Walmart’s raise in wages—that there’s something of a shortage of workers right now (at last). So those workers will be in demand elsewhere.

It’s a general rule of thumb that, the lower the pay rate, the quicker a worker can find a job. Over a certain level, you add a month of searching for every $10,000 in annual pay. Except for management, most of the laid off workers are in the under $20,000 a year range; that means they’re very likely to find new work within the two months of their severance pay. If they get work very quickly with a different company, that severance is actually a bonus.

Lack of control, and that sense of insecurity, may feel uncomfortable while you’re in a moment of upheaval. But this is America, where opportunities abound when government gets out of the way. There’s always a good chance that change will lead to something better. There’s a reason we still talk about the American Dream.