The Hidden Reasons Grocery Prices Are Still Rising

It was just a couple of years ago that the price of eggs was the single most important issue in American politics, and for good reason. When a dozen eggs cost nearly $8, it’s not easy to make the case that the economy is fine, or that we’re still a first-world country. It’s also difficult to convince people to let you hold onto power, which is why Donald Trump hammered the issue at every opportunity. Even if Democrats hadn’t nominated a dementia patient and an alcoholic in the same year, there’s a good chance that, all by itself, the price of eggs would’ve sunk the party.

A couple of years later, there’s some good news and bad news. The good news is that the price of eggs has returned to Earth. Retail egg prices are now around 40% lower than they were in June of last year, and they’re continuing to decline every month. So problem solved on that front. There’s evidently no more bird flu to worry about, and people can once again cook breakfast.

The bad news is that the price of basically all of the other groceries in your refrigerator has been going in the opposite direction. And I’m not just talking about a small increase here. As you’ve probably noticed, it’s very significant across the board. But it’s probably even worse than you realize. Here are some hard numbers to give some historical context. The New York Post reported, “Food prices in the U.S. have shot up by 33% over the last seven years, the biggest jump in grocery prices in half a century — with no relief in sight. While rampant inflation was to blame for the biggest surge during the pandemic, prices have continued to soar since, with ground beef best demonstrating the out-of-control market as it hit $6.82 a pound in June, a 79% increase from 2019, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

A big part of the reason why beef is so expensive is that the supply of cattle has dwindled (by some estimates, to its lowest levels in many decades). That’s in part because of years of droughts, which have killed the grass that keeps the cattle fed. We’ll talk more about the root causes below.

But beef isn’t the only problem. Food prices, in general, increased by more than 2% in 2024 and nearly 3% in 2025. And food purchased away from home — at restaurants and drive-thrus, for example — has been even worse. So-called “food away from home” prices increased by roughly 4% in both 2024 and 2025, which is much faster than the historical average. And all of these increases are stacked on top of previous increases.

The New York Post article continues: “Between 2012 and 2019, the U.S. saw a total increase in food prices of just 6.4%, with the cost skyrocketing once the pandemic hit in the early months of 2020. Following the pandemic’s damaging effects — between January 2021 and January 2023, food prices surged by about 21%, and costs have continued to go up by nearly 10%.”

It’s yet more evidence demonstrating that the COVID lockdowns ruined everything. The lockdowns had second-order effects that no one in power considered at the time, even though they were obvious to anyone who’d ever worked a real job. But before we get into all of those second-order effects and how our leaders caused this crisis, the most important takeaway here is that food prices are worse than they’ve been in memory. This is not merely a political problem. It’s not simply “bad for Republicans in the midterms,” just like the price of eggs was bad for Kamala Harris in 2024.

History shows that when food becomes harder to obtain, people get very restless and angry very quickly. If you drew up a list of every revolution that ever took place, by far the number-one cause is that food suddenly became too scarce or too expensive. It doesn’t matter where you look — from France to Russia to Africa to Europe to Imperial China. In every single region, in every single era, people have had a rather strong (and understandable) desire to eat and feed their families affordably. Prevent them from doing so — or make it considerably more expensive and difficult for them to do so — and you will have created a powder-keg situation. And the worst people in the world will be ready to take advantage. In their desperation, the citizenry won’t hesitate to vote for charismatic foreign-born socialists who promise to resolve the food shortages — even though everyone with a grade-school education understands that this socialism is how you cause food shortages, not how you solve them. Socialist leaders won’t merely make things worse. They’ll destroy the country, which of course is their goal.

This is not a hypothetical scenario. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani just announced that five city-owned grocery stores will open by 2029 (with the first one opening by the end of next year). He promised that the stores would simply set prices so that they’re 30% lower than you can find anywhere else. Yes, that’s the plan. The government is going to implement Soviet-style price fixing, and undercut the market by running and subsidizing its own grocery stores.

The discount will apply to “all fresh produce, meat and seafood, along with roughly 20 additional categories of pantry staples, dairy and refrigerated goods.” Everyone will be able to access the discount, without regard for income. The mayor’s office says that, combined, “the savings are projected to cut New Yorkers’ average grocery bill by 15%, about $90 a month, or roughly $1,000 a year.”

Wow, it’s so simple. Just set the prices to 30% cheaper than — well, he doesn’t say exactly — but 30% cheaper than anything else, we can assume. It’s ingenious. If stuff is too expensive, just have the government come in and require that it not be too expensive. Why didn’t anyone else think of that? I mean, other than the Soviets and the Cubans and the Romanians and the Vietnamese and the Cambodians and the Ethiopians and every other third-world population that’s ever existed. Aside from all of that, this is a truly novel idea. While we’re at it, why doesn’t the government just take over every industry and undercut the market by 30%? In fact, why stop there? Why not undercut the market by 50%? Why not 75%? Why not 99%? Why not give everything away for free? Imagine a city-run Apple store, or a city-run Porsche dealership. Just walk in and pay $10 for a car. Nobody should ever have to pay more than $10 for a vehicle. That’s a human rights violation. If cars cost more than $10, just make them be less than $10. Problem solved. Who could possibly complain?

This is the extent of the logic on display here. To call it “childlike” would be to insult children. Really, the historical comparisons to other countries aren’t even relevant. You don’t need to study other countries to understand, on its face, how disastrous this will be. If you think for a second that this is a good idea, then you should immediately self-deport to other countries that are governed like this. Go visit Cuba sometime, where a $10 tip is more than most people make in an entire month.

By the way, as the National Review pointed out, Mamdani was holding up some bananas during that press conference. A banana currently goes for 23 cents at Trader Joe’s in Manhattan. He picked maybe the least expensive food item in any grocery store to illustrate why we need state-run grocery stores. There is no universe in which 23-cent bananas could possibly be difficult for anyone to afford in New York, especially given that everyone in the city is on some form of welfare. But we’re supposed to pretend otherwise. He’s legitimately trying to make the case that if New Yorkers only have to pay 16 cents per banana instead of 23 cents (because other New Yorkers are being forced to subsidize the cost of bananas), then somehow life is going to get a lot more affordable.

The exact opposite is true. Bananas — like virtually every item in the grocery store, with the exception of alcohol and lottery tickets — are extremely low-margin items. The typical net profit margin on purchases at a grocery store is between 1-3%, and bananas are no exception. If the government opens up enough of its own stores — where everything is subsidized by taxpayers — then the existing grocery stores (including the crappy ones, which they call “bodegas” in New York) will be unable to compete. People will stop buying the more expensive bananas when a subsidized option is available, which means before long, bananas will become much harder to find (outside Mamdani-marts). Privately owned stores will have no reason to sell them anymore. And then, because the only place to get bananas will be the Mamdani-marts, before long — as this process repeats with every other grocery item — the lines will stretch out to the street, just like they did in the Soviet Union.

The only argument in defense of Mamdani’s plan is that it’s limited to five grocery stores at the moment. By themselves, these stores won’t serve enough customers to destroy the market for food in New York. This is always the best possible argument for any Left-wing policy, by the way. The best argument is always that the policy won’t be as destructive as everyone thinks. Which means even the best argument still acknowledges that the policy will be destructive to some extent. In this case, the hope is that people will see lines going out the door, they’ll see the homeless people doing drugs in every aisle, and they’ll notice that the shelves are empty all the time and everything is mismanaged, and then they’ll go back to Trader Joe’s. But if Mamdani’s program expands — which is obviously the long-term goal — then the result will be catastrophic. And that’s not even going into what will happen if the subsidies run out (meaning, if the few remaining taxpayers in New York decide to stop funding this insanity and leave the city). At a certain point, a death spiral begins, and it’s impossible to pull out of it.

Of course, socialists (particularly the female and foreign-born Mamdani supporters) reject all of these complaints. They’re convinced that Mamdani has the magical ability to set prices 30% lower, without any negative consequences whatsoever.

Mamdani is showing Americans how much they’ve been propagandized by our government. pic.twitter.com/XehB5f7nLA

— Subi-doo ???? (@suzamaroo) August 1, 2026

First of all, credit to this woman for sticking with just one camera angle — even if it was a weird one — instead of 20 different cuts with 50 different poses. That’s a genuine improvement in TikTok production from the typical socialist woman on the app, and we need to applaud it. At the same time, it needs to be said that the beginning of her video just doesn’t work. If someone says, “I don’t understand how Mamdani’s plan is going to work, it seems like communist nonsense that will destroy the economy,” it doesn’t make sense to reply with, “You said it yourself, you don’t understand.” If you’re going to sass an imaginary person who you made up for the video, the quip needs to make some sense. Yes, he admitted he doesn’t understand because it doesn’t make any sense. The act of not understanding something doesn’t mean you’re an idiot. Just as easily, it could mean you’re dealing with an incoherent concept. When someone says they don’t understand Mamdani’s socialist policies, they don’t mean that they don’t understand in the way that they don’t understand calculus, or some other coherent though complex topic. They mean they don’t understand in the way that they don’t understand the gibberish ramblings of the homeless crackhead on the subway platform. They don’t understand it because it’s nonsensical. There is nothing to understand.

She tries to make the case that if you buy up all the ingredients for a loaf of bread, you could sell the loaf for more than a 1-3% profit margin. And therefore, we’re supposed to conclude that the grocery stores are raking in big bucks. But the ingredients themselves are not the only input that creates a loaf of bread. Labor counts as an input. Someone has to mix those ingredients. And then there are many different fixed costs, like an oven, and a building for the oven, and so on. It’s actually more work (and more money) than you might think.

Mamdani’s plan to short-circuit these overhead costs, contrary to what this woman says, is not remotely similar to Aldi’s model. Aldi maintains its profit margins by selling Aldi-brand slop and making the shopping experience as unpleasant as possible. It markets itself to people who don’t care about variety, or shelves that are stocked properly, or employees who will bag their goods, or have any will to live. But Aldi does not force New Yorkers, at gunpoint, to subsidize any of the items it sells. It doesn’t demand that New Yorkers pay for its rent, its tax bills, its employees’ salaries, and everything else.

This is a very important distinction. It’s not a “different business model” that Mamdani is proposing. He’s proposing no business model at all. He’s taking people’s money and redistributing it, using a grocery store as a mechanism. And the cost, again, cannot possibly be matched by competitors. Mamdani’s stores won’t convince Trader Joe’s to lower its prices on bananas, because it can’t go any lower without losing money. Instead, this operation will quickly drive countless grocery stores out of business, to the point that people have no choice but to form breadlines at their local Mamdani-Mart. And this socialist woman does the same thing that socialists always do, by pretending that things that are government subsidized are somehow free. She says that Mamdani-Marts “don’t pay rent.” And that’s true. But that’s only because the taxpayers are forced to cover the cost. Yes, it’s incredible just how “cheap” everything suddenly becomes when you put a gun to the head of the taxpayer and force him to pay for it. But cheap for who, exactly? Not for the taxpayer. He’s the one whose pockets you’re wringing out. So this is “cheap” specifically for people who aren’t paying taxes. For the leeches, the non-contributors. You aren’t erasing any burdens. You’re just shifting more of the burden onto the dwindling group of people who are already forced to carry almost all of it.

There’s another massive problem too, which is that these stores create an incentive for members of the public — including people from outside New York — to buy up everything from the shelves in order to resell it. There’s a guaranteed 30% profit margin after all. That’s already what happens very often with merchandise in third-world cities like Los Angeles — people steal from CVS and then sell the merchandise on the sidewalk. In this case, the city is making it very easy to do the same thing. They’re inviting theft.

Mamdani was asked about his plan to prevent this from happening. His answer (or really, the answer from one of his stooges) belongs in a museum.

Mamdani wants to protect tax payer funded grocery store from non-NYC residents… they’ll need an ID card to enter.

You can make this up. pic.twitter.com/lXs2SKdjBt

— Nick Plumb (@PlumbNick) August 2, 2026

Yes, Mamdani-marts will require ID. Now your library card won’t just buy you a front-row seat to hobos doing indecent and unspeakable things. Now, it will get you access to state-funded groceries too. Of course, you still don’t need your ID to vote. That would be preposterous. You don’t need your ID to vote because voting is a right, which for some reason means we shouldn’t do anything to protect it. But wait a minute: Mamdani also says that access to affordable food is a right. And yet in that case he will require an ID. If you didn’t know any better, you’d get the impression that socialists just make up the rules as they go. What they said five seconds ago has no bearing on what they’re saying in the present moment.

It’s all so obvious and so demoralizing that you have to wonder how we got to this point. Mamdani’s election is largely the result of the foreign takeover of New York City, as we’ve discussed many times before. In the third-world, socialism is an attractive ideology, because people aren’t bright enough to realize that it doesn’t work. Morality is often a foreign concept to them. (There’s a classic Polish book called “In Desert and Wilderness” that makes this point, using something called “Kali’s morality.” In the book, an African boy named Kali tries to explain his understanding of right and wrong. He says, “If somebody takes Kali’s cow, it’s a bad deed. If Kali takes somebody’s cow, it’s a good deed.” And that’s the end of that.)

All the same, it’s too simplistic to say that foreign invaders are the only explanation for what’s happening. The fact remains that Americans — particularly white liberal women — are lining up to support socialist candidates all over the country. And many people, regardless of their politics, are understandably and justifiably furious that groceries are now so expensive. So how did this happen? Why exactly did groceries get to be so expensive?

One explanation, which you rarely hear, relates to the wars in Iran and Ukraine. There’s been a ton of price pressure on fertilizer, which just so happens to be made from the same precursors as explosives and propellants (used in ammunition, artillery, etc.). Natural gas in particular is a huge part of the production of nitrogen fertilizers. And the wars have made fertilizer and gas far more expensive. Farmers can pass the cost along to consumers in the form of higher prices, or they forgo some fertilizer in exchange for smaller yields (which has the same effect — higher prices). This was a report from the beginning of the Ukraine War, by the Wall Street Journal.

This war never ended. Instead, we now have a new war — one involving Iran, a major global energy producer that holds the second-largest natural gas reserves in the world. So we have simultaneous wars involving the biggest fertilizer exporter (Russia) and two of the biggest energy producers in the entire world, Iran and the United States. This is a recipe for exactly what we’re seeing in grocery stores, and every other sector of the economy that’s dependent on these particular inputs.

Add in disease and droughts, and you get the perfect storm. As Douglas Holtz-Eakin told The New York Post, “The spike [in grocery prices] has remained persistent due to shrinking U.S. cattle herds and the start of the Ukraine war in 2022. … Grocery prices have gone up especially in 2021, but they have stayed high due to cattle disease and bad growing conditions,” he said. “The war in Ukraine hurt as well because it’s essentially the grain basket of the world.”

But the wars are only part of the problem. As we mentioned earlier, the COVID lockdowns were the beginning of the decline. We were all forced to stay indoors, and businesses were forced to close down — even though all of the experts (including Johns Hopkins) now concede that the lockdowns served no purpose whatsoever. In exchange for suspending our personal freedoms and destroying the livelihoods of tens of millions of Americans, the federal government started mailing “stimulus checks” and funding other welfare programs that cost around $5 trillion. Additionally, because the markets were crashing, the Fed spent trillions of dollars buying up assets to artificially keep the markets afloat. This money was essentially created out of thin air; the Treasury borrowed the money, and the Fed, in turn, bought treasuries from the market. It’s like we fired up the money printer. Naturally, when you introduce all of this new money into the economy, the value of every dollar goes down — that’s basic supply and demand. Therefore, prices go up, across the board — including at grocery stores.

I should note — because not enough people mention this — that a lot of this money was created specifically to fund pension programs for the elderly, as well as welfare for non-white foreigners and “emergency top-ups” for hospitals during the lockdowns. We weren’t generating nearly enough tax revenue to cover these obligations, so we simply created the money. Congress carved out all kinds of exceptions for illegal aliens with the “Families First Coronavirus Response Act” and the “CARES Act,” to ensure that foreigners could receive “preventative care” for COVID, as well as COVID testing, treatment for acute emergencies, and so on. “Community Health Centers” received billions of federal dollars in exchange for treating anyone who walked in the door. States received even more money to help insure foreigners, in case they came down with the flu — I mean, COVID.

On that note, since he’s been in the news lately, here’s Anthony Fauci talking to a random guy in D.C. about COVID. You may remember this clip. But notice what Fauci says at the end of it, concerning the number of fatalities from the flu:

Remember when Fauci got owned by a guy on a porch? pic.twitter.com/h6tgnGI8PS

— Tommy Robinson ???????? (@TRobinsonNewEra) July 12, 2026

If you listen closely, he admits that the death count from the flu was “virtually none” during COVID. It’s amazing, when you think about it. At precisely the same moment COVID was spreading like wildfire, for the first time in recorded history, no one in the entire country managed to die from the flu. It’s almost as if we started counting all deaths from the flu (and many other diseases) as COVID deaths. It’s almost as if hospitals had a financial incentive to count as many “COVID deaths” as they possibly could, because they’d receive more federal funding if they did. More specifically, if hospitals documented that they were treating someone on Medicare for COVID, then they’d receive a 20% increase in Medicare payments. In other words, if a hospital was treating an old person — a member of the population most likely to die, by far — they had a massive incentive to claim that the person was suffering from COVID. If they did that, they’d get more money. That was another invention of the CARES Act, which paid out hundreds of billions of dollars.

All of this spending — with money the government didn’t have, for the benefit of a very specific subset of the population — has led to the higher prices we’re seeing now.

This is part of a much broader issue, which is that our leaders have a perverse incentive to provide an extraordinary number of entitlements for the elderly and illegal aliens. The elderly, of course, are one of the most powerful voting blocs in the country. They show up to the polls in greater numbers than anyone else. Many of the politicians they vote for are also elderly. Retirement doesn’t exist as a concept for our elected leaders. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been essentially catatonic and bedridden for months, if not years, and he still hasn’t resigned. And there’s a lot of self-interest here — among both the elderly politicians and the people who vote for them. That’s why older voters refuse to consider the possibility of Social Security reform, even though Social Security is a giant Ponzi scheme that forces every working American to waste a portion of their paycheck every two weeks — money that they could’ve invested themselves, for infinitely better returns.

Yes, we should respect our elders, obviously. Yes, people who paid into Social Security should have their money returned. But many of our policies favor older Americans at the expense of young families, who are in the process of being economically strangled, and nobody seems to care. Again, our politicians have no incentive to tell the truth about any of this, because any politician who does so will immediately be expelled from office.

As for illegal aliens, of course, they’re vital to the globalists’ campaign of mass demographic replacement, so they’re entitled to infinite spending as well. To the extent that our elites panicked during COVID, it was because they feared illegal aliens might get wiped out — reversing the effects of years of their open-borders policies. So we had to spend hundreds of billions of dollars making sure the illegals had emergency-room care, masks, fake vaccines, and so on.

The result is that interest payments on the national debt are now more expensive than defense spending. The defense budget is around $900 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office expects that interest payments on our debt will exceed $1 trillion this year. In just the first quarter of 2026, the interest payments totaled more than $270 billion, so we’re well on our way. Other than Social Security payments, nothing’s more expensive for this country than interest payments on our debt. Since the COVID lockdowns, for context, we’ve more than doubled our interest payments. In all of 2019, we only spent something like $375 billion on interest payments. But now the Fed refuses to lower rates, and we’ve spent so much more money, that the payments are now completely out of control.

In related news, we’re losing control over our ability to manage interest rates. You can sense this from the tension between the White House and the Fed, which refuses to change interest rates (despite a lot of pressure from the president, as well as the appointment of a new Fed chair). The problem is pretty clear: A single percentage-point increase in the interest rate now means that we’ll owe $3 trillion more over the next decade. Raising rates could have disastrous consequences for our finances. Meanwhile, if the Fed cut rates, as the president wants, there’s a legitimate risk of making inflation even worse. And this inflation risk is higher because the government is already spending far too much money, and injecting far too much money into the economy. We boxed ourselves into a position where there’s no clear right answer.

And in the meantime, some of the most prominent commentators and podcasters in the country are busy every day rambling about conspiracy theories and getting into soap-opera feuds with other prominent commentators and podcasters. There’s been very little discussion about one of the most dangerous developments in this country’s history, which is that people are struggling to pay for their ever-increasing grocery bills. As long as the Left is responding to this crisis, while the Right obsesses over nonsense and gossip, the socialists will continue to win elections all over the country. That’s how socialists have always risen to power, all over the world.

In February 1917, female textile workers went on strike, demanding bread. In a matter of months, the Bolsheviks quickly rose to power with the slogan “Peace, Land, and Bread.” They were forcing people to empty out their bank accounts at gunpoint soon afterwards. We discuss all of this in our latest “Real History” special. But it’s hardly the only example. The Hungarian Soviet Republic formed after severe food shortages in Budapest. Ahead of the French Revolution, bread cost something like 80% of the typical family budget. Rioters stormed the Bastille in part to find grain. The German Revolution of 1918 followed failed potato harvests, which led to mutinies, strikes, and the ouster of the Kaiser. The Paris Commune of 1871 followed food shortages after the Franco-Prussian War, in which people were reduced to eating zoo animals and household pets. Hundreds of thousands of people died in Greece during the Great Famine following Axis occupation, leading to the rise of a communist party called the National Liberation Front (and setting the stage for a civil war). In America, following the Great Depression, Democrats began trying to pack the Supreme Court and destroy our institutions, which was the closest we’ve come to a genuine leftist revolution here.

WATCH: The Real History of Communism: The Russian Revolution

Less than a century later, suddenly a large-scale leftist revolution is once again plausible. All the elements are there: the foreign wars, the “days of rage,” the constant Left-wing assassinations and domestic terrorism, inflation, and an affordability crisis that’s making groceries more difficult to obtain than they’ve been in recent memory — all of it stacks, and all of it compounds. The Left has no solution to any of this; all of their ideas would make the problems far worse. But unlike the leaders of the Right, these socialists have one major advantage, which is that they understand the fact that the problems do exist. They’re speaking to an audience about issues that actually matter — even if their solutions always involve creating more of the exact kinds of problems they’re supposedly trying to solve. If we spend the next five months focused on foreign affairs and intra-Right wing squabbling, while the Left talks about groceries, then the truth is, it doesn’t matter if they propose Soviet-style grocery stores that will obviously fail. They’ll win anyway, because they’re at least doing something. They might be doing the worst possible thing. But generally, the people who do something — even the worst thing — tend to win over the people who do nothing at all. That’s the lesson of every socialist revolution throughout history. And unless we start taking some legitimate actions to reverse this trend — starting with an immediate end to these foreign wars, and a refocus on the most important domestic matters, starting with the price of food — it will be a lesson we’ll inevitably learn as well. And learn the hard way.