At the Grocery Store: 46 Years of American Food Prices

Every month since the late 1970s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has sent data collectors into grocery stores, supermarkets, and convenience stores across the country to record the actual dollar price of more than 150 individual items. Not an index. Not a weighted average. The actual price — in dollars and cents — of a pound of white bread, a dozen large eggs, a gallon of whole milk, a pound of ground chuck.

The Average Price survey is one of the most granular economic datasets in existence, and it tells a story that the Consumer Price Index alone cannot. Where the CPI shows a smoothed trend line, the AP data shows volatility, regional variation, and the stubborn specificity of individual goods. A pound of bacon in January 1980 cost $1.45. By February 2026, it cost $6.98 — an increase of 381%. A pound of bananas, over the same period, went from 32 cents to 65 cents — an increase of just 105%. Same grocery store, same shopping cart, vastly different inflation experiences.

This is the story of what happened to the prices in America’s grocery aisles over the past forty-six years — item by item, dollar by dollar.

Most grocery staples followed a pattern that economists call “gradual nominal rigidity” — prices that drift upward over decades in a way that barely registers from one month to the next but compounds into something staggering over a lifetime. White bread went from 50 cents to $1.84 per pound. That is 2.9% per year, almost exactly matching overall CPI inflation. Ground chuck went from $1.82 to $6.70 — also 2.9% annualized. Flour, the most basic commodity in the American pantry, went from 20 cents to 55 cents per pound.

These items didn’t spike. They didn’t crash. They just drifted upward, year after year, compounding quietly until a pound of sliced bacon that once cost less than a subway token now costs more than a fast-food combo meal.

The chart below indexes six grocery staples to January 1980. Each item starts at 100. What matters is the spread: by 2026, bacon has risen to 480 — nearly five times its 1980 price. Bananas sit at 205 — barely doubled. The gap between the fastest and slowest inflators in a single grocery aisle is 275 percentage points.

Not every grocery item follows a gentle upward arc. Eggs are the single most volatile staple in the American food supply — and the past four years have made that painfully clear.

For most of the period from 1980 to 2020, a dozen grade-A large eggs cost between 80 cents and $2.00. The price bobbed around within that range, occasionally spiking after a disease outbreak or feed-cost shock, but always reverting. Then came the avian influenza epidemics of the 2020s. In January 2023, a dozen eggs cost $4.82 — more than five times the 2020 price of $1.46. The culprit was Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza (HPAI), which killed over 58 million commercial birds in the 2022–23 outbreak, the worst in American history.

Prices dropped back to $2.52 by January 2024 as flocks recovered. Then HPAI struck again. By January 2025, eggs hit $4.95 — a new record. The virus has now become endemic in wild bird populations, making recurring outbreaks a structural feature of the American egg market rather than a one-time shock.

Coffee tells a different volatility story. Ground roast coffee cost $3.21 per pound in January 1980 — already expensive because of the devastating Brazilian frost of 1975 that had sent global prices soaring. By 1985, prices had fallen back to $2.59 as supply recovered. Then came another cycle: a spike to $4.40 in 1995 (Brazilian drought), a retreat, and a relentless climb from 2020 onward as climate change, supply chain disruptions, and surging global demand pushed prices to $9.46 per pound by February 2026 — the highest in the survey’s history.

At the opposite end of the spectrum sits the most price-stable item in the entire BLS grocery survey: the banana. In January 1980, a pound of bananas cost 32 cents. In February 2026, it cost 65 cents. That is an increase of 105% over 46 years — an annualized rate of just 1.6%, well below the 2.8% average for all food items.

Why? The answer is a combination of ruthless agricultural efficiency, economies of scale, and the peculiar economics of tropical commodities. Bananas are grown on massive plantations in Central America and Ecuador, shipped on specialized refrigerated vessels, and distributed through supply chains that have been optimized for over a century. They are also loss leaders for many grocery stores — priced below cost to draw shoppers through the door. The result is that bananas have effectively gotten cheaper in real terms. Adjusted for overall CPI inflation, a pound of bananas today costs about 40% of what it cost in 1980.

The table below shows every major grocery item tracked by the BLS from 1980 through early 2026, ranked by total percentage increase. The range is enormous: bacon leads at +381%, while bananas trail at +105%. The median item roughly tripled — consistent with overall consumer price inflation over the period.