A Pew Research Center poll out last month found that 8 in 10 registered voters said the economy is their top issue in the election.
And there’s nothing like a trip to the grocery store to remind you of inflation.
“We’re charging $4 for the white eggs, which are grocery eggs,” says Dianne Shenk, owner of Dylamato’s Market, a small, successful grocery store in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood neighborhood,.
“We’ve been charging $6.25 a dozen for the brown eggs from our farmer for the last four years.”
NPR reached out to Datasembly Inc., a market intelligence company that tracks billions of grocery item prices every week. They gave us a year’s worth of grocery price data for places all over the country.
Then we went to talk to voters about the data in Pittsburgh, figuring if the battleground state of Pennsylvania is the presidential campaign’s whirlwind, Pittsburgh is the eye of the storm.
In Pittsburgh, the price of eggs is up nearly 40% in the last year, as bird flu decimated flocks of egg-laying hens. The price increase locally is among the highest across the nation’s 50 top metro areas.
But, eggs aren’t the whole story. Prices for fish and poultry in the area have dropped, even as beef and pork are up by 4% to 5%.
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And the impact on Steelers fans’ tailgate parties has been minimal: The price of beer is up only 2%.
Nationally, grocery inflation has been cooling: It’s up a bit over 1% in the last year. But that’s after an increase by more than a quarter since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Who’s better off?
Yodora Diamond, a former Hazelwood resident who returned just to shop at Shenk’s store, didn’t mind talking politics as Shenk’s husband rang up her order. She said she believes her grocery bill will be lower if former President Donald Trump is elected, because she thinks he will be better for fuel prices and farmers.
“I just know how it was when he was in office.” Diamond said. “Financially, I was much better.”
Just down the street, Bruce and Emily Thornton own the 1:11 Juice Bar, which offers freshly pressed fruits and vegetables. They’ve seen the cost of their ingredients increase.
Bruce says he disagrees with some Biden administration policies and will reluctantly vote for Vice President Harris, who he says “might be a little better” for him and his family.
“She says she is willing to tax the upper class,” he says, “and I believe that that is necessary for us as we move forward in our society — that there needs to be a real tax on people who are making all this money and then everyone else is kind of hurting.”
Who’s hurting and who’s not when it comes to buying groceries might play into the presidential campaign’s sharp gender gap, in which Trump leads among men, and Harris among women.
A local quality-of life survey at the University of Pittsburgh published earlier this year suggested a possible gender gap in the way people are personally affected by inflation. A higher percentage of women than men said they had trouble paying for food at least sometimes.
More women than men also said that recent inflation has had a large impact on them and their spending habits, says study author Sabina Deitrick.
“If it’s more likely a woman in a household who would be doing the shopping … it certainly has had a larger impact on spending habits for women than it has for men, according to our survey results,” Deitrick says.
Grocery inflation is a kind of trip down Memory Lane
Of course, it’s not just the inflation numbers that could drive political attitudes and voter choices. It’s also the perception of inflation.
A few years ago, Harvard Business School economist Alberto Cavallo and some colleagues stopped shoppers outside grocery stores in Argentina and scanned their receipts. He then compared their beliefs about inflation to the real inflation rates affecting what they bought.
The two didn’t align. Specifically, shoppers often overestimated increases in the prices of their products and underestimated past prices.
In forming their beliefs about inflation, Cavallo says, “people do seem to put a lot of emphasis on things they can connect to — things that are in their basket.” He says shoppers’ memories of past prices drive their perceptions of inflation and how they think it might affect them in the future.
The problem, he says: “Their memories are really bad.”
Shenk hears about prices from her customers every day but says they’ve been showing some restraint when it comes to politics.
“We don’t have people going off about stuff. They’d like to but they kind of catch themselves and they're like, oh, well, you know, we're not going to talk politics.”
Pollsters, on the other hand, have been talking politics pretty intensely for months now. And an NPR analysis of presidential election polling calls Pennsylvania a “toss-up.”
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