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You are not imagining it
The most common thing people write to us is some version of “I used to be good at this.” You still are. Shopping changed.
Put in what you spend now and see what the same food would have cost before all of this.
The same groceries, back then
What you spend now, a week
$200
The same groceries in 2019, estimated
$151.09
The difference, over a year
$2,543.32
The same shop costs about 32 percent more than it did in 2019.
That is a couple of months of groceries, on exactly the same food as before.
You are buying the same food. It costs more. That is the whole story, and none of it is something you did.
An estimate, not your actual basket. Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for food at home, series CUUR0000SAF11, which measures groceries specifically rather than all spending. We take the annual average index for 2019 and for 2026, and multiply what you spend by the ratio between them. The 2026 figure is an average of the months published so far rather than a full year, so it moves as more are released. Your own basket may have changed differently, because an average hides the items that moved most.
What actually happened
Grocery prices rose 11.4 percent in 2022. That was the fastest rise since 1979. Then they slowed down, which is not the same as coming back down. They never came back down.
At the same time, the coupons that used to close the gap mostly stopped arriving. Coupon distribution fell from about 235 billion in 2019 to 34 billion in 2025 (sources).
Two things got harder at once, and neither of them was you.
So what can be done about it?
The gap is real, and a good part of it is recoverable. Knowing your own prices is where most of it comes back.
Start your price bookWhere did the coupons go?
A straight explanation of what happened to the Sunday insert, and what replaced it.
Download the free explainer