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Paper receipts are quickly becoming a thing of the past at grocery stores, especially as app-based ordering and tracking becomes more common.
Few shoppers save old grocery receipts, but apps like Instacart store your order history for years.
Now, some customers are using past orders to discover the very personal impact inflation has on them.
For Chrisman White, a 33-year-old escape room designer from Virginia, the price of groceries at his local Publix has nearly doubled since October 2019.
in video White shared her experience using Instacart’s “reorder item” feature on TikTok, explaining how a $35 order skyrocketed to more than $62 over the past five years.
“The reason I originally went back to Instacart was because it was the only thing that allowed me to accurately track what I purchased,” he told Business Insider.
White said he was inspired by another TikTok user who tried out the feature. Posts The outlandish story that Walmart+ order prices have tripled over the past two years (with some commenters suggesting this is due to the company replacing out-of-stock items with more expensive items from third-party sellers).
Although price increases have slowed significantly in recent months, cumulative inflation It’s risen about 23% in the past five years, meaning what was once $1 is now $1.23.
But the figure is calculated across a range of spending categories, with groceries in particular seeing uneven increases over the period.
Add shrinkflation to the mix and it may take some work to recreate the contents of your past carts at a dollar-for-dollar price.
“A lot of the items have changed names or quantities or weights, so they don’t translate exactly,” White explained, “so we had to actually look up each item and put it in our cart.”
White pointed to carts’ love affair with Lox (which has more than doubled in price) as a big factor in the increase in sales, but told BI that national brands like 12-packs of Pepsi and Pedigree dog food are also contributing to the increase.
For comparison, BI analyzed two previous Instacart orders placed by editorial staff in Los Angeles and New York City.
The first was a pandemic Passover meal prep at Gelson’s in Los Angeles in 2020, which came to a subtotal of $76.24 before tax, tip and fees. Today, that order would cost $93, a 22% increase that’s roughly in line with overall inflation at the time.
The second is a modest but well-balanced purchase at a Manhattan Wegmans, which in May 2022 had a subtotal of $89, and has now jumped to nearly $105, a 17% increase that far surpassed the official inflation effect of 7% at the time.
White told BI that reactions to his video, which has been viewed nearly one million times, have been extremely polarized.
“People are very divided on this issue,” he said. “Some say it’s inflation, some say it’s corporate greed. I think it’s a bit of a combination of both.”
Graphics provided by Andy Kiersz.