Online Grocery Prices Dip for First Time Since Pandemic

Online grocery costs reportedly fell last month, their first dip since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The cost of food declined by 0.1% in October compared to the same month in 2023, Bloomberg reported Tuesday (Nov. 12), citing data from Adobe based on roughly 1 trillion visits to retail sites and more than 100 million products. This was the first annual decline since January 2020.

Adobe’s online grocery price gauge has more or less moved in tandem with the U.S. government’s Consumer Price Index findings for food consumed at home, per the report. In September, that measure was 1.3%, following a peak of more than 13% in 2022.

Post-COVID cost-of-living increases — particularly where food was concerned, hurting lower-income consumers — helped contribute to President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the report said.

In the aftermath of the election, people living paycheck to paycheck are feeling pinched, whether they voted for Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris, or whether they live in a red state or blue.

PYMNTS Intelligence monitors the progress and challenges confronting consumers and households at every income level who exhaust virtually all their take-home pay on monthly household and debt obligations. More than 66% of consumers said in October that they live paycheck to paycheck, up from the 56% who said the same two years ago.

“The pressures of living paycheck to paycheck were, not surprisingly, top-of-mind … as people voted,” PYMNTS reported last week. “PYMNTS Intelligence will be shining a spotlight on its own findings tied to how economic concerns influenced the just-past election cycle soon. But as the Associated Press noted, as many as 3 in 10 voters said that they felt family finances were ‘falling behind.’”

Meanwhile, globally traded food commodities reached their highest level in 18 months in October, fueled by challenges that included adverse weather conditions.

The FAO Food Price Index, which keeps track of monthly changes in the international prices of these commodities, rose 2% from September and climbed 5.5% from October 2023, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations said last week.

The index’s reading last month was the highest since March 2022, which was the index’s apex and 20.5% higher than the most recent figure.