June 17, 2008 7:56AM

Price Hikes at Home

By Cheryl Casone

If you shop often at the grocery store, you may have noticed prices are starting to go up. In fact, a friend of mine, who doesn’t shop that often, and had not been food shopping recently (we are New Yorkers, we eat out a lot) was shocked to see how much everything had gone up. Not just fruit, not just vegetables, but across the board price increases.

Welcome to high gas and diesel prices. You hear us talk about the gas price story, and assume we are talking about the cost to fill your tank. Think about small businesses in this country and what it is costing them to transport, ship, and stock their shelves.

Is there any good news? Well, possibly. I was looking at a report last week that made the argument we could see a return to “Made in America.” One of the frustrations, and causes of increased protectionism in this country, has been the loss of jobs to other countries. Now, American businesses are finding it is too costly to import toasters and tractor sets, and are looking for goods manufactured here.

That’s good right? Well, no it isn’t. Those goods are more expensive to produce here because of labor, taxes, and general overhead. So, get ready for not just a jump in prices for your apples and celery, get ready for the next wave of prices hikes, and I mean BIG price hikes, everywhere and for everything that we consume.

4 Responses to “Price Hikes at Home”

Comment by Mark

June 17th, 2008 at 10:47 am

“That’s good right? Well, no it isn’t. Those goods are more expensive to produce here because of labor, taxes, and general overhead. ”

If they are going to stop importing the goods because its cheaper then how can it be more expensive? I understand that the total cost of the item will be higher but the price would have been higher anyway due to shipping costs. Am I confused?
Comment by Justin

June 17th, 2008 at 10:59 am

too many dollars chasing too few commodities. The money that didn’t disappear when the real estate bubble crashed has gone into commodities. I don’t even think we’ve begun to see the inflationary effects of the most recent rate cuts either. There’s a delay between cheap money at the central bank and that very money flooding into the market place. Of course, using corn to fill up our gas tanks is pretty stupid too. With the heart land under water and a major portion of the corn crop ruined, food prices are set to sky rocket. Throw in a major hurricane in the gulf pushing oil to $200 a barrell and the money from the most recent fed rate cuts entering the market, we could very well see hyper inflation. But a country boy can survive.

The doom and gloomer,

Justin
Comment by Glenn

June 17th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

There’s been a quiet price hike occuring for years that people don’t notice and is going to make the coming price hikes even worse. We can all do without the big screen TV that your eluding to in your blog, but food is where the real pain is getting worse by the day. With Junk Food being my weakness and the tendency of people to turn to food in tough times, let’s take a closer look at your package of cookies or carton of ice cream. You used to get a pound of chocolate chips from the supermarket and now they are 13 oz. disguised as ‘new self seal package’. In the Ice cream department you used to buy a ‘half gallon’ of ice cream and now we can only buy 3.6 pint containers. (4 pints in a half gallon by the way). Even at the same price you don’t get what you used to for the money and the manufacturers seem to be accelerating this bait and switch lately. The other trick is to change the measurement like in the case of a half gallone into pints so your not sure how much your getting. Next time you go shopping look a little closer at the incredible shrinking packages.
Comment by Bruce

June 19th, 2008 at 10:54 am

If we reduce the price of doing business here at home, namely taxes and interference from government, we would bound to see lower prices at the retail level. Make the competition fair both within our country and with imports, then the true level of competition will drive prices.