by Alina Selyukh
NPR
Are greedy corporations to blame for inflation?
Ariane Navarro thinks so. She recently pulled up her budgeting spreadsheets from 2021 and was shocked by how much her family’s grocery bill has skyrocketed.
She’s not imagining it: From February 2020 to this July, grocery prices grew a cumulative 25.6%. That’s higher than overall inflation, which was 21.6% during that same period.
“We have no other choice — we have to buy groceries,” says Navarro, who lives in Houston. “That’s a basic need. And so [companies] use that to kind of take advantage and keep raising prices.”