Man Realizes His Standard Grocery Order From Walmart Costs 4 Times As Much Only 2 Years Later — ‘$414 Worth Of Groceries For Just Me’
It's shocking to see just how huge the price jump is after two years of inflation, greedflation, and shrinkflation.
RossHelen / Canva Pro It's certainly no secret that grocery prices have soared in the past couple years — it's impossible not to notice. But quantifying just how much is difficult, and reports on pricing derived from government tracking never seem to align with just how difficult it has become to afford food.
One man on TikTok, however, stumbled on a clever trick to figure out just how much things have changed in his area. And the findings from his experiment are pretty staggering.
He said his Walmart groceries cost four times as much as two years ago.
According to the Federal Reserve, grocery prices have risen 25% since 2020, which means that what cost a dollar in the comparatively blissful days before the pandemic now costs $1.25. But many people's experiences would suggest the Fed's statistics aren't taking in the entire picture.
Doesn't it feel like things have risen so much more than that?
Here's an example from my own life. I've only lived in my current residence for a year, and there's only one grocery store in my little town — so I notice when prices change. When I first moved here, my usual coffee creamer was $2.79.
Then, six months ago, it jumped to $3.09 and again to $3.29 during the holidays. Last week, it jumped to a ludicrous $3.69 — nearly a whole dollar more in just a single year and a heck of a lot more than 25%. It's a 32.26% change in price, in fact.
That's nothing, however, compared to what TikToker @sewerlidd found when he weighed a grocery order from 2022 against one in 2024 — a nearly four-fold increase in prices that has him and thousands of other people gobsmacked.
The man saw a previous order in the Walmart app from 2022 and duplicated it. The price went up by hundreds of dollars.
"I feel like I'm gonna be sick," the TikToker said in his video. He explained that he looked through his purchase history in the Walmart app and came across a grocery order from 2022 that was a month's worth of groceries for himself.
The 2022 order contained about 50 items, running the gamut from fresh spinach to packets of ramen noodles and rice, and totaled up to $126.67.
Just out of curiosity, he said he hit the Walmart app's "reorder all" button to duplicate the same order in 2024. The price was downright shocking: $414.39.
That is a far cry from a 25% increase — which would come to more like $158. Other people's anecdotal experiences were on par with what the TikToker claimed.
Prostock-studio / Canva Pro
"I used to spend $180 for two weeks for my family of four and the dog," one mom wrote in response to his video. I am now spending upwards of $430 and trying to figure out what else I can cut. Sorry, kids, you don't get barbecue sauce."
She is, of course, far from alone.
Large retailers, Walmart included, are now decreasing prices after customers were forced to change their shopping habits, showing that grocery price increases were never entirely about inflation in the first place.
From the very start of the skyrocketing prices we experienced beginning in 2021, we've been told it all came down to inflation caused by the pandemic. Shutting down manufacturing and distribution, coupled with pent-up consumer demand, sent prices for everything through the roof.
And since inflation reduction and price reduction are two very different things — and the latter typically only happens in times of full-on economic collapse — prices on things like groceries have continued climbing, just much more slowly than before.
But it has since become crystal clear that inflation, which peaked in the summer of 2022 at a 40-year high of 9.1%, was far from the whole story. Corporations and retailers — from oil and gas companies to food makers and grocery stores — have also been jacking prices ever higher under the guise of inflation just because they can, in a process called "greedflation."
This is not to say inflation isn't real. It very much is. But one late 2023 study found greedflation accounted for at least 50% of the price increases the US has seen since 2022.
Drazen Zigic / Getty Images Canva Pro
Corporations, especially those making our groceries, have also begun using "shrinkflation" — literally shrinking the sizes or amounts of the food in a package without changing its price — to further extract even more money from us.
Both of these notions were largely pooh-poohed by economists and officials as consumer bellyaching until very recently. But if you needed any further confirmation that companies and retailers have been full-on scamming us in recent years, look no further than huge retailers recently announcing plans to slash prices on groceries.
Walmart, Target, and Amazon Fresh have all announced plans to cut prices to lure back shoppers or entice them into buying products they've foregone in recent years due to affordability. They have, in fact, begun an all-out pricing war on things like milk and diapers in a bid to offset the loss in business they've suffered by gouging customers.
Here's hoping it works because it's gotten entirely out of hand. The fact that they've opted to lower prices at will makes it obvious that it was never entirely inflation gouging us to begin with, but simple, good old-fashioned greed. And we shouldn't stand for it any longer.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.