Food prices are too damn high.
I’ve known this in my gut for a while now, but the full absurdity hit me the other week when my wife spent $58 (tax and tip included) on three chicken-salad sandwiches. No booze, no fries, no soda. Just two with side greens and one with potato chips.
And before you assume this was in New York or D.C. — nope, it was in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. A quaint, liberal college town, yes, but not exactly Midtown Manhattan.
Now, maybe you’ve become inured to this. But in my mind, a sandwich like that should run about $5.
Around the turn of the century — a phrase I’ve waited my whole life to use — I used to enjoy a lunch special that featured two massive slices of pizza, a hearty side salad and an iced tea for $4.95 in Clarendon, Virginia, just outside Washington.
Today, I feel lucky if I get out of a coffee shop in Appalachia without taking out a second mortgage. Prices go up, sure, but my paycheck hasn’t exactly kept pace. And yours probably hasn’t either.
The same could be said of portion sizes. The other day, at a different West Virginia restaurant I haunt, I noticed something new: The menu prices were the same, but the portions were smaller. A smaller BLT, a shrunken side salad.
Shrinkflation had come for me, too.
Now, you might be thinking: This guy’s just a cheap, cranky old codger and a glutton. Maybe. But the point is that food isn’t optional. It’s a “non-discretionary expense,” as the wonks say. Meaning this affects all of us. The poor don’t get a pass.
Even McDonald’s is expensive now. Last year, a photographer stumbled across an abandoned McDonalds in Alaska with a menu from 1994. It showed that “a Big Mac was $2.45, a Big Mac meal was $4.59, a six-piece McNuggets cost $2.35, a Happy Meal cost $3.36 and an egg McMuffin was $1.95.”
The New York Post went on to note that “now, a Big Mac meal — which includes a burger, fries and a drink — has increased to $18 in some locations.”
If you’re a family of four, you could end up dropping close to $100 for a night out — at McDonalds.
Of course, I shouldn’t pick on the Golden Arches. This problem is pervasive. That’s why many Americans are voting with their feet and spending less time eating out.
But if you think you’ll save money by eating at home, you might be in for a rude awakening. CNBC reports that grocery prices are nearly 3 percent higher than a year ago — well above the Fed’s target inflation rate of 2 percent. So, either way, you’re paying more to feed yourself.
The reasons are many — pandemic-era supply chain chaos, energy costs, weather and labor. And it’s global, so you can’t really pin it on one politician.
But voters don’t care about economics textbooks, right? They care about their supermarket receipt. At least, that’s what we were told when — fair or not — President Joe Biden got blamed for high food costs. Indeed, according to an AP survey, voters who were worried about inflation in 2024 broke hard for Trump.
President Trump, for his part, promised to “bring prices down on Day One.” How’s that going for him? About as well as his campaign pledges to release the Epstein files and end the Ukraine war on Day One.
Worse still, Trump’s tariffs could make food more expensive. And the first prices to go up will likely be for healthy food, as importers of fresh produce can’t stockpile lettuce the way they can stockpile canned goods. Cheap farm labor performed by migrants has long helped keep food prices down, but Trump’s immigration crackdown could bring that to an end.
Will it matter? Americans still say they care deeply about food prices. An AP-NORC poll found that 53 percent call grocery costs a “major stress,” with 33 percent saying it’s a “minor” cause of stress.
That’s a total of 86 percent of Americans who are, to some degree, stressed by these costs. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone.
But will anyone blame Trump or Republicans for this?
After his 2024 election, conventional wisdom suggested that James Carville’s maxim still holds: “It’s the economy, stupid.” No amount of spin or excuses can make people feel better when they’re getting fleeced at the checkout line.
That theory suggests that Trump will be blamed for high food prices — just as Biden was (perhaps unfairly) blamed.
Of course, there’s the competing theory that Trump’s base is a cult and normal political laws don’t apply to him. He’s magic.
Which is it? My guess: True believers are great at ignoring scandals, but not so great at ignoring hunger pains. Unless food prices drop dramatically (an unlikely possibility), we’re about to find out.
Matt K. Lewis is a columnist, podcaster and author of the books “Too Dumb to Fail” and “Filthy Rich Politicians.”
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