"Has anything gotten cheaper?" asks NPR. "We shopped at Walmart to find the answer." Spoiler, no, except for grapes, nuts and Ocean Spray.
Over and over, I pick up an item just to return it to the shelf because of its higher cost: a bag of Lay's potato chips, a jar of Pace salsa.
When asked about their price increases, Lay's and Pace didn't comment. Walmart, in a statement, said it was "committed to providing an Every Day Low Price experience … with the goal of having the lowest price on a basket of goods over time."
Other big brands sent statements to NPR pointing to their own higher costs: fertilizer, packaging, shipping, wages. Jif cited pricier peanuts; Yoplait, pricier milk for its yogurt. The global cocoa shortage has Lindt and Hershey raising prices. Avian flu has hiked the cost of eggs.
The term "exonerative tense" was coined by political scientist William Schneider to refer to the evasive, anxious language newspapers use to describe killings by police officers without saying police killed anyone. This sort of journalism might be called the exonerative hence, where a forthright review of a politician's pledges is really about telling readers that nothing could be done about the problem in the first place, and that you were naive to have trusted any promises that we earlier reported, attentively and impartially, as news.
You're going to be seeing a lot of exonerative hence when it comes to things that aren't getting done.
Previously:
• Watch man at supermarket 'hunt' for groceries with bow and arrow
• Rash of butter burglaries plaguing Guelph groceries
• Watch thousands of robots pack groceries in a warehouse
• Getting groceries during COVID-19 maps perfectly onto Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey