Potatoes, bread, olive oil – many things are getting more expensive. And often for no reason. Sometimes you really want to push over a plank.
Prices rise, sentiment explodes Photo: Daniel Bockwoldt/dpa
At the supermarket checkout, I first encountered a feeling that has accompanied me ever since: a new anger. Beep, beep, beep goes the cash register and the number on the display grows and grows. “23.84 euros, please,” says the cashier and I startle: these are just the ingredients for a pretty boring dinner for two. Can it really be that expensive? Anger comes home with me and looks over my shoulder as I cook. “Do you really need that much olive oil for the salad dressing?” she asks, looking scared.
I have been practicing frugally for years with grocery shopping and cooking myself, I learn those kinds of things during my studies and now during my internship. But now that doesn’t help me that much anymore. Since 2020, food prices have risen by almost a third. Some products, including many staple foods, have been hit particularly hard: flour and potatoes have halved in price, bread and rolls have increased by 40 percent. Sugar prices have increased by 80 percent. Olive oil is twice as expensive as it was in 2020. I have started saving in other areas because healthy food is essential to me. I haven’t bought new clothes for a long time, I hardly ever eat out and I go to the cinema less and less.
Inflation is making itself felt. Energy, fertilizers and animal feed are more expensive, there are also higher personnel costs and a higher minimum wage. But food prices are rising faster than the prices of other products and faster than the general inflation rate. Sometimes there are understandable reasons for this: the olive harvest is suffering from climate change, grain prices have risen due to the war in Ukraine. But all price increases can no longer be explained in this way. In the slipstream of inflation, the food industry and supermarket chains are also hiding price increases that benefit their own profit maximization.
They do this quite freely: The four major supermarket chains have enormous market power in Germany, which dictates low incomes for producers and high prices for consumers. There are more and more of them on the shelves of supermarkets highly processed foodswhich are mainly profitable for the food industry. The industry does not care that their products are often harmful to health. sometimes this is even hidden.
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Now my anger accompanies me every time I go to the supermarket and makes me look closely. I come across shrinking packets of rice and bags of cereal that are sold for the same price as before. The coconut content of coconut milk has been reduced and a thickener and two emulsifiers have been added. ‘New recipe’ promises a chocolate bar whose ingredients list shows that it now contains more sugar and less cocoa. The frozen spring rolls are sold in the same package size, the small print stating that there is less vegetable filling and more dough in the package.
‘Shrinkflation’ is the way food producers and supermarkets want their customers to believe that nothing has changed. In France, such manoeuvres should be flagged In Germany, the FDP blocked a similar law.
As I now walk past the fresh vegetables in the supermarket and reach for the cheaper tinned version, the industry is securing its profits. Sometimes I want to push over all the shelves in the supermarket. Of course that doesn’t help, so I go home and eat porridge and peas.