Charlotte Maggio bought an upright freezer for her basement during last year’s holiday sales and has been stocking it with home-cooked meals.
An avid tracker of grocery deals, the retired librarian also stocks up on coffee when she finds it at a good price. She typically spends about $230 a month on groceries, including occasional treats.
“I’m hoping those measures will help me avoid spending on things that become severely inflated in price,” says Maggio, who grew up on the West Side and now lives in Franklin Park.
Maggio isn’t alone in wanting to get her grocery bills down.
Consumers — frustrated by prices that shot up in 2022 and never came down — are facing the highest inflation level since February, and tariffs threaten to drive prices higher. Consumer prices rose 2.7% in June, compared with a year earlier, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.
High grocery prices played an outsized role in November’s presidential election, with 7 in 10 voters saying they were “very concerned,” in a November survey by the Associated Press.
Then-candidate Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail that if he won, he would “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.”
So in December, the Chicago Sun-Times started tracking monthly grocery prices of 35 items at four stores: Jewel, Mariano’s, Target and Walmart. We found very few items actually dropped in price. We plan to continue tracking prices and sharing our results.
With Trump marking six months in office Sunday, we dove into the data and found the total price of our shopping cart was up as much as $11. Most of the products we tracked stayed at their already-high price or got more expensive:
- At Jewel, Chicago’s largest grocery chain, the shelf prices for everything on our list totaled $262.45 in December and $273.35 in July, a 4.2% increase, or $10.90. Ten of our items went up in price, 22 stayed the same and three declined: Land O’Lakes butter, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and Tide laundry detergent.
- The shelf price for five items on our list rose at all four chains: ground beef, Tropicana orange juice, a 12-pack can of Coke, Always pads and Degree men’s antiperspirant deodorant. Prices for Nathan’s bun-length hot dogs, peanut M&Ms and Folgers ground coffee went up at three of the four stores.
- Egg prices came down at all the stores from their peak in March, when they cost as much as $9.49 a dozen due to an avian flu outbreak. But prices at some stores were still higher in July than they were in December.
- Walmart typically had the lowest prices and the most falling prices. But at times, the store we shopped online — Walmart Supercenter at 4626 W. Diversey Ave. in Belmont Cragin — listed items as unavailable. For the 31 items we were able to compare online between December and July, 10 went up in price, 15 stayed the same and six declined, for a net increase of $3.97.
Jewel and Mariano’s did not respond to requests for comment.
Target declined to comment.
A Walmart spokesman said the retailer is “working to keep prices as low as possible for as long as possible … regardless of the environment we’re operating in.”
‘Cheap food is dead’
Appearing on NBC News “Meet the Press” in December, Trump said, “I won on the border, and I won on groceries. Very simple word, ‘groceries.’ … When you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time, and I won an election based on that. We’re going to bring those prices way down.”
But days later, Trump told Time magazine, “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up.”
Voters were angry about food prices that were up 28% in 2024, compared with 2019, a spike attributed to inflation from the pandemic that also came as food companies like Mondelez and Kraft Heinz were rewarding investors with dividends and stock buybacks.
Experts say it’s impossible for a president to drive grocery prices down, short of instituting price controls — which means high prices on store shelves are probably here to stay.
“Cheap food is dead,” says Errol Schweizer, a retail merchandising, product development and brand strategy expert based in Austin, Texas.
Schweizer, who publishes The Checkout Grocery Update newsletter, says the current price increases aren’t as pronounced as during the pandemic but “are going up pretty consistently,” as food companies seek to maintain their profit levels.
Store chains, he says, “are watching each other’s prices, and if nobody is going down, nobody is going down.”
LaTanya Gray, 60, of Lake Meadows has no illusions about prices getting better. She employs a step-by-step strategy to stretch her food budget, starting with making a weekly meal list based on what she has in her kitchen and budgeting a tight $60 for additional grocery items.
She sets a $5 maximum for any single grocery item, with few exceptions, and she starts her weekly shopping at a nearby dollar store.
Gray also signs up for store and brand emails, clips paper and digital coupons, and sometimes calls her favorite food brands’ manufacturers to see if they’ll send her a coupon.
She says her frugality comes from being the oldest of four siblings, whose mother was sometimes in poor health. She remembers going to the store at age 8 to help buy groceries with food stamps.
“I was kind of trained because of my family situation,” she says. “You have to make sure your expenses don’t exceed your income.”
Tariffs spark worries
One of the most difficult steps Maggio has taken, as a proud Italian American, was crossing off imported prosciutto from her shopping list.
“I remember being able to get prosciutto, maybe four years ago, for $6 a pound. Then it went up to $7, $8 a pound. Now, if it’s on sale, it’s $9.99. … This week, it’s $14. And I’ve seen, a couple of weeks ago, it was $15,” she says. “There’s some things I won’t do any more, you know?”
This comes as other essentials pinch people’s wallets.
Illinoisans are seeing some of the biggest increases in the nation for home insurance premiums. Chicago consumers will also soon get hit with higher rates for electricity. Rents and home prices are up. So are interest rates.
And Trump is now threatening to set a 30% tariff on the European Union by Aug.1, along with 35% tariffs on some Canadian goods and 30% on some Mexican imports.
Since taking office this year, Trump has implemented, then often pulled back, double-digit tariffs on goods from countries like China, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and, recently, Brazil.
Economists have said tariffs will ultimately be passed down to consumers in the form of higher prices — on products like electronics, appliances, clothing and toys.
Market basket price swings
Some items on the Sun-Times grocery list could be vulnerable to price swings from tariffs, including coffee, chocolate, bananas and avocados, as well as products that use containers and packing materials from abroad.
The Tax Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan policy group, estimates the average American family could pay an extra $1,300 in tariff-related price increases this year.
In a quarterly survey of national consumer attitudes by the University of Illinois and Purdue University, 79% of about 1,000 respondents said in May that they expected tariffs to increase, or somewhat increase, the prices they pay for food.
Half said they had put off a purchase because of tariff concerns and 38% were stockpiling items in anticipation of tariffs.
“I do think people are bracing for impact,” Brenna Ellison, an agricultural economics professor at Purdue, says.
There were other reasons for some of the price increases, the Sun-Times found.
Ground beef, which increased by about $1 a pound between December and July, has been affected by low U.S. herd sizes, increased feed costs and drought.
Asked why the price of an 18.08-ounce bag of peanut M&Ms rose at three of the stores we checked, a Mars spokesperson cited “high inflation and spikes in material costs — driven in part by well-documented increases in the cost of cocoa.” They said the company tries to absorb extra manufacturing costs “wherever possible.”
A Tropicana spokeswoman declined to comment on the price increases we saw for its orange juice.
The parent companies of most of the other brands did not respond to requests for comment.
Procter & Gamble, which owns brands like Always and Charmin, announced in April that it would increase prices of some of its products because of the trade war. Asked about the price jumps we tracked for Always pads, a P&G spokesman said “pricing is left to the sole discretion of the retailer.”
That’s true, says Eric Anderson, who chairs the marketing department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. But retailers’ shelf prices follow the manufacturers’ list prices, he added.
While most manufacturers are loath to raise their prices, once they do, the stores almost always follow suit.
“When that price goes up, the shelf price goes up,” he says. “It’s not a mystery.”
Higher prices squeezing your budget? Here’s a few ways to save.
With twin 18-year-old daughters living at home and an adult son nearby, Quintonele Allen of Homan Square says keeping food in the fridge is a challenge.
Peach-flavored yogurts vanish as soon as they arrive. So did a recent container of leftovers that was supposed to be Allen’s lunch.
One of her daughters, walking out the door recently to a summer program, carried two sandwiches, three waters, three Crystal Light packets and two bags of chips in her bag.
“I shop literally every day, every other day,” Allen says. “Especially now, it’s the summertime. They eat it all.”
Allen, 43, a community health worker, says she spends about $600 a month on groceries and another $40 to $60 a week on takeout meals.
Her shopping routine is complicated.
Since she doesn’t have a car to get groceries, Allen either takes the bus — which means she can’t buy in bulk — or pays to have groceries delivered.
She often orders groceries through her Walmart membership, but for meat and produce she prefers the Pete’s Fresh Market near the United Center, though it’s a trek from Homan Square.
She likes the coupons on Jewel-Osco’s app, but getting there is also a long bus ride. Allen says there aren’t many good grocery options in her immediate neighborhood.
To try to keep costs down, she picks up tips at healthy cooking demonstrations and tries to plan ahead so she doesn’t waste anything.
“It’s like a balancing act,” Allen says.
Here are 10 more tips for saving money:
- Have a list — and don’t shop while you’re hungry or in a hurry.
- Frequently check for advertised sales posted on a grocer’s website.
- Pay attention to prices for items you regularly buy so you’ll know when something’s a good deal.
- Join your store’s loyalty program and download their mobile app, where you can often clip digital coupons that are automatically applied to your purchase.
- Stock up if a sale is really good and you know you’ll use it.
- Freeze fruits and veggies that are getting too ripe.
- Avoid expensive, over-processed food by home-cooking in large batches and freezing portions for future lunches and dinners.
- Look for a store’s private label, or house brand, as they’re often just as high quality as the brand name versions and can easily save you 25%.
- When faced with a confusing sale — like “buy three, get one 50% off” — look at the unit price on the shelf to determine whether it’s actually a good deal.
- Eat less meat and add more beans, lentils and other legumes in your diet. They’re cheaper, yet still packed with protein.