Find out your grocery prices with USA TODAY’s interactive tool
Track grocery prices by city and item using USA TODAY’s interactive shopping cart.
Jesi Aviles knows exactly how much her weekly grocery bill will be before she goes to Walmart.
“When I go to the grocery store, I know I can’t leave without spending $400.”
The 32-year-old stay-at-home mother of five in Mount Airy, North Carolina, has seen that number steadily increase over the past few years. Just two years ago, she could easily support a family of seven on $200 a week. Now the cost has doubled. The family spends about $1,600 a month on groceries, more than their $850 rent.
If you can’t see the graphic, click here.
Aviles said he has noticed price increases throughout the year, but the past few months have been especially marked. They gave up soda. Aviles recalled that her family used to buy two 12-packs for $5 or $6, but “we don’t have those sales anymore. Now it’s like $5 or $6 for just one pack.”
Aviles isn’t alone in feeling like she’s leaving the grocery store with fewer items for the same amount of money today.
Her experience reflects the reality of the nation.
Rising food prices are increasing the burden on American households. What was once a manageable part of a monthly budget has become a permanent financial burden, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted supply chains and caused double-digit price increases.
USA TODAY has launched an interactive tool that lets readers look up grocery prices over time and across cities, and select specific items to add to a standardized shopping cart.
Powered by Bright Data, a data scraping company, our shopping cart tracks real-time prices collected weekly from at least one Walmart online marketplace in each state. The basket includes exact prices for specific items, such as a pound of ground beef, 12 market-side cage-free brown eggs, great value white bread, and other staples.
Choose your city, select the items you regularly buy and add them to your virtual cart to see how prices change from week to week.
Ricky Volpe, an agribusiness professor at California Polytechnic State University, said Walmart’s prices are typically 10 to 20 percent lower on an individual item level than traditional supermarkets like Kroger, Albertsons and Publix.
Walmart, which has more than 4,000 stores nationwide, is “actually a very good way to track what’s really going on with the rate of change in grocery prices,” Volpe said.
He said that unlike traditional grocery stores, which rely heavily on promotional sales and weekly circulars, Walmart keeps the price increases on its products relatively consistent.
“Walmart is promoting, but they’re not playing that game to anywhere near the same level as Kroger, Albertsons, Stop & Shop and Publix,” Volpe said.
This stable pricing strategy could explain why USA TODAY’s price basket, based on Walmart data, has seen certain items drop slightly in some cities in recent weeks even as overall grocery prices nationwide have risen.
If you can’t see the graphic, click here.
Double-digit inflation in groceries
Food costs were a major issue in the last presidential election, with voters ranking it as one of their top issues. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, inflation will peak at 9% in 2022, and food prices will rise further, with household consumption of food increasing by 13%.
Inflation has eased since then, but U.S. shoppers are still paying nearly 30% more for groceries than they were six years ago, according to the Grocery Price Index from data firm Datasembly, which tracks retail prices.
The index monitors weekly price changes at more than 150,000 stores and 200 retailers across more than 30,000 ZIP codes nationwide. USA TODAY revised the index to show the percentage change in product prices compared to the first week of October 2019.
Protein prices are rising
Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to lower grocery prices, consumers like Daniel Petcash don’t feel much peace of mind at the checkout line, especially when buying in bulk proteins like beef and eggs, products that have been in short supply and soaring in price over the past few months.
The 25-year-old former college basketball player and current sports nutrition coach knows exactly how much eggs will cost in 2022 and now.
why?
Petcash eats six eggs every morning and a pound of beef almost every night.
Every 10 days, he goes to his local Aldi in St. Petersburg, Fla., and loads his cart with 6 to 12 cartons of eggs and 8 to 9 pounds of ground beef.
Petcash said she vividly remembers three years ago when eggs were only $1.12 or $1.13 a dozen. That price jumped to $5 per dozen in early 2025 due to the bird flu outbreak, but has now fallen to about $2 per dozen.
He has since switched from pasture-raised eggs to conventional eggs to save money. I’ve also given up on the convenience of pre-made meals that can be cooked in the microwave and found myself eating out less frequently.
“Either everything is about the same or prices are going up,” Petcash said.
“I only need to work to buy food.”
Autumn Robson works full time as a phlebotomist in Wichita Falls, Texas. But she’s not working to pay her mortgage or pay her utility bills. Her entire salary goes toward one thing: supporting her family of five.
“My husband pays all the bills, so I actually only work to pay for the groceries,” said the 34-year-old mother of three. “I literally just work to pay for the groceries.”
Historically, economists paid little attention to food prices in monetary policy decisions, viewing them as a small portion of household budgets when incomes were increasing significantly.
As income growth slows and wealth becomes more concentrated among high-income earners, that calculus changes, making food an increasingly burdensome burden for many families.
When economists say that wage increases in recent years have offset inflation, they’re not talking about everyone.
Data on wage growth from the Federal Reserve shows that all income groups experienced increases during and after the pandemic, peaking just before the summer of 2023. However, the increase was unevenly distributed. Low-wage workers now see the slowest wage growth as labor demand eases.
For many families, most of the wage increases were quickly swallowed up by rising costs for groceries, housing, and child care.
Robson’s monthly grocery bill has tripled since before the pandemic, from $400 a month to about $1,200 now, just a few hundred dollars less than her monthly mortgage payment.
“It’s crazy that groceries are as expensive as housing,” said Robson, who shops mostly at Walmart, every two weeks, and spends about $600 per trip.
She said almost everything she buys has gone up in price.
To save money, Robson now chooses store-brand products, such as microwaveable pastries, rather than name-brand products. “I stopped buying the original Hot Pocket brand. I buy Great Value because it’s $3 cheaper,” she said. “My daughter can’t tell the difference.”
But even store brands are a little more expensive. Great Value Soda, which used to cost $2.50 for a 12-pack, now costs about $5.
She was surprised by her grocery bill. “Sometimes you think it’s going to be $300 at checkout, but it’s actually $500. That happens almost every time.”
Convert your shopping results into cash
When her family’s grocery bills became too expensive, Robson began documenting her shopping trips on social media, gaining thousands of followers on TikTok. So did Aviles, a mother of five who lives in North Carolina.
Aviles, known as “Mama J. Ray,” shows off her overflowing shopping cart, the deals she’s found, and the dinner she’s making that night. With grocery prices soaring, her video went viral, garnering hundreds of comments asking how much she spent and how she could afford it, as well as asking about cheaper brands and money-saving tips. Aviles currently has over 1 million followers on TikTok and earns money from his content through brand partnerships and audience engagement. It helps pay for the groceries she takes.
“Unfortunately, I don’t have the ability to control the price of things,” Aviles said. “But I can control my income and I can control what I can do with it.”
Will food prices fall in the future?
None of the shoppers interviewed by USA TODAY were optimistic that prices would drop soon. Robson even worried about how long his family would be able to keep up. “If food prices go up any more, I won’t be able to afford to go to daycare. So I have to stay home. Then I won’t be able to afford to buy groceries.”
Experts would agree that food prices are unlikely to return to previous levels. Instead, the increase continues, but more slowly than in 2022.
Food prices rose 3.1% in September from a year earlier, according to the latest federal data. That figure could rise further if predictions that new tariff policies would drive up prices come true, or if climate-related events such as widespread drought disrupt the supply of beef and other staples. Avian influenza outbreaks also pose a threat to egg prices, especially as bird migration season begins.
Last year, the first drought in decades affected all 50 states, forcing farmers to sell their cattle and creating beef shortages. Similar weather patterns have pushed up coffee prices in Brazil.
The impact of the Trump administration’s new tariffs on imports remains uncertain, but the recent “significant jump” in food prices, as shown by the federal Consumer Price Index, could be a sign.
“Many economists, including myself, see this as something of an early visible impact of the tariff situation and some extreme weather events affecting commodity prices,” said Volpe, an agribusiness professor.
Joseph Balagtas, an agricultural economist at Purdue University, said his team at the Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability has noticed that food inflation has caused Americans to change the way they shop.
“We’ve seen some savings,” Balagtas said. “Moving to branded stores, replacing beef with cheaper cuts of meat like chicken, looking for coupons, and shopping more often.”
