That article It makes me wonder if grocery prices are rising faster in Wisconsin than across the country. they have!
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“When Trump was president, there was no inflation,” she said. “We can afford food.”
Providing food depends on costs and income. We can look at the costs — though not specifically for Wisconsin. We can see them in the upper and lower east (Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio).
Figure 1 shows that the increase in food prices in the central and eastern regions is higher than that of the whole country, but lower than the overall increase in the central and western regions.
On the other hand, the cumulative gap between food prices and overall CPI is larger than the national level.
In the last quarter of 2023, the gap was about 4.5 percentage points (that is, starting from January 2021, food price increases were 4.5 percentage points higher than the overall price level). At the national level, the corresponding gap is about 2.5 percentage points.
Despite rising food prices for Wisconsinites, especially those in the upper Midwest, as of the second half of October 2023, Wisconsinites spend $49 less per week on groceries than the national average of $270.
Wages and salaries do increase over time compared to 2021. Food prices relative to wages and salaries per capita were as high in the first quarter of 2023 as they were in the second quarter of 2020. Although it has since recovered, the third quarter of 2023 (the latest available data) is still about 6% lower than the fourth quarter of 2019.
Why are prices rising faster in the north-central Northeast (and Midwest) than across the country? I thought it might be concentration in grocery stores, but I've seen very few studies (e.g. Cakir et al., 2023) represents the association between concentration (as measured by the Herfindahl index) and the price level, rather than the rate of change.
