@wbez_chicago: Charlotte Maggio bought an upright freezer for her basement during last year’s holiday sales and has been stocking it with home-cooked meals. An avid tracker of grocery deals, the retired librarian also stocks up on coffee when she finds it at a good price. She typically spends about $230 a month on groceries, including occasional treats. “I’m hoping those measures will help me avoid spending on things that become severely inflated in price,” says Maggio, who grew up on the West Side and now lives in Franklin Park. Maggio isn’t alone in wanting to get her grocery bills down. Consumers — frustrated by prices that shot up in 2022 and never came down — are facing the highest inflation level since February, and tariffs threaten to drive prices higher. Consumer prices rose 2.7% in June, compared with a year earlier, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday. High grocery prices played an outsized role in November’s presidential election, with 7 in 10 voters saying they were “very concerned,” in a November survey by the Associated Press. Then-candidate Donald Trump vowed on the campaign trail that if he won, he would “immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.” So in December, the Chicago Sun-Times started tracking monthly grocery prices of 35 items at four stores: Jewel, Mariano’s, Target and Walmart. We found very few items actually dropped in price. We plan to continue tracking prices and sharing our results. With Trump marking six months in office, we dove into the data and found the total price of our shopping cart was up as much as $11. Most of the products we tracked stayed at their already-high price or got more expensive: Read more at WBEZ.org Story by Stephanie Zimmerman Video by Brian Ernst #groceryshopping #groceryprices #chicagonews #foodprices

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Tuesday 22 July 2025 17:34:14 GMT