KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Six weeks ago, the KSHB 41 I-Team started monitoring the prices of milk, bread, cereal, eggs and ground beef at five metro grocery stores to better understand how inflation is affecting Kansas City.
It wasn't meant to be an apples-to-apples price comparison, since the brands and sizes can vary from store to store.
Instead, the I-Team was tracking overall inflation while searching for patterns.
Six weeks later, out of the five locations visited each week, the prices at Aldi and Walmart stayed the most consistent.
And of all the items tracked, the greatest price fluctuation was seen in cereal.
When the I-Team took that data to Larry Wigger, an economics professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who specializes in analyzing the supply chain, he wasn't entirely surprised.
"Labor costs, shipping costs, their transportation, the cost of packaging, right? At some point during the last two years of this pandemic, they’ve got to stop and say, "Okay, wait a minute, everything is costing us more. That needs to show up on the price for that box of cereal,'" Wigger said.
As for how much the price changed, Price Chopper cereal is $1.30 more expensive, and the price at Hy-Vee went up by $1.96.
However, these prices are subject to sales, and some of the lower costs could correspond to weekly specials.
One thing that surprised the I-Team was that there wasn't a significant change in the price of ground beef.
But Wigger says that could be the result of lower demand for beef right now, something that could change as it gets warmer out.
"You’ve got to look at the seasonal impacts," he said. "Some things you know we consume in much greater quantities at certain times of year ... I would assume we grill out more, we go out to restaurants more in the warmer times of the year, so not as much demand for it right now."
And as time goes on, Wigger says it's not just meat that could increase more.
He warns that sometimes it takes more time for companies to internalize the costs of inflation and start to pass those on to consumers.
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