That Adds Up: Supermarket Prices Ten Percent Higher in a Year
You’ve probably felt it in your wallet long ago: groceries have become considerably more expensive. In addition to raw materials, energy prices also rose exorbitantly, and food production and logistics naturally require energy too. A double blow for consumers. Have you ever wondered, when yet another price tag appeared on the shelf, what those groceries cost a year earlier?
Extensive research has now been conducted into this, and the results are anything but mild:
Prices Shoot Through the Roof
Supermarket prices rose by no less than 10 percent in a year, according to extensive comparisons carried out by the Consumentenbond. That is the average price increase, but for some specific products, prices shot through the roof entirely.
Almost Half as Expensive Again
I don’t think we’ve ever gone completely wild over someone because they smelled of Axe Africa Shower Gel, but Unilever and the supermarkets apparently thought it appropriate to charge 45 percent more for this stuff in the space of a year. While a 250 ml bottle cost € 3.03 in March 2021, a year later, in March 2022, it cost € 4.39. Still, you can’t eat or drink it, so let’s quickly move on to other categories.
Butter Price or Gold Price
The biggest price increases occurred among leading brands. Campina Botergoud butter became 32 percent more expensive, and Hak applesauce 29 percent. The latter is remarkable, because do you know one of the few things that actually became cheaper in a year? Apples…
Lots of Fruit and Vegetables Have Actually Become More Expensive
Cucumbers, courgettes and pears, on the other hand, became considerably more expensive. Tough luck if you’d like to eat a fresh, spicy cucumber salad every day, or fried courgette with almonds, but on the other hand, you’re obviously doing the right thing by trying to keep a large part of your meal plant-based.
Listen to the Consumer Association
Is there any way to ease the pain a little? Consumentengids offers useful tips on which apps and websites can keep you informed about special offers, and it may sound obvious, but store brands are of course almost always cheaper (unless it’s an outlier or perhaps a special offer from a leading brand). Store brands also became more expensive, but less sharply than leading brands.
In short: you weren’t imagining it; you probably really did have less left at the end of the month. And the end of the price increases still doesn’t appear to be in sight, so perhaps you should prepare for a frugal summer…
Also read:
- Research shows: meat substitutes are no more expensive than meat
- Fact: a cup of coffee has never been this expensive
- Nothing to be done: dining out is becoming more expensive
Source: Consumentengids
