From the CPI release, food at home (aka grocery) prices:
Figure 1: CPI food at home component (bold black), ERS January forecast (blue square), ERS February forecast (red triangle), ARIMA(1,1,0) forecast 2021M01-2025M02 (chartreuse line), all s.a. Source: BLS, ERS, and author’s calculations.
This made me wonder how prices for “ordinary folk” are doing in general. We know the CPI is “plutocratic” representing expenditure weights of the household at about the 67th percentile. I show food-at-home and shelter components of the CPI, as well as the American Institute for Economic Research’s (AIER) “Everyday Price Index”, or EPI, all normalized in logs to 2024M11=0.
Figure 2: CPI-all urban (bold black), CPI food-at-home (tan), CPI shelter (green), AIER Everyday Price Index (red), all in logs 2024M11=0. Source: BLS, AIER, and author’s calculations.
Some other information:
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/eggs-us
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/beef
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/milk
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/gasoline and https://www.gasbuddy.com/go/average-us-gas-prices-fall-to-lowest-march-level-since-pandemic
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/wheat
Home prices – https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS
Not seeing the forecasted trends the ERS is offering in those numbers.
Hamburger runs about 2/3 the cost of chuck roast and about half the cost of steaks in the Covid era in the U.S. Recently beef prices are up by roughly 10% year-over-year:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1EzUq
Here’s the thing. Imported beef mostly ends up as the lean portion of hamburger, while fat trimmings from domestic beef make up the rest. If not for hamberger, those fat trimmings would mostly end up as tallow. The combination of throw-away fat and cheap imported lean beef accounts for the low cost of hamburger relative to whole cuts.
Because the bulk of the recipe for hamburger is lean, and lean beef is what we import, odds are hamburger prices will rise more than steaks and roasts as (if) tariffs bite. Hamburger isn’t just poor-people food, not by any stretch, but steaks and roasts are certainly a smaller part of the diet of the poor than of the well-off.