Receipts from online shopping apps like Instacart give a highly personal view into how inflation has impacted Americans.
Crisman White
Paper receipts are fast becoming a relic of a bygone era at the grocery store, especially as app-based ordering and tracking have gotten more popular.
And while few shoppers would save their old grocery receipts, using apps like Instacart keep your order history for years.
Now, some customers are using those past orders to discover inflation's highly personal impact on them.
For Crisman White, a 33-year-old escape room designer from Virginia, the price of a basket of groceries from his local Publix nearly doubled since October 2019.
In a video on TikTok, White shared his experience using Instacart's "reorder items" function, explaining how a $35 order skyrocketed to more than $62 in the past five years.
"I went back to my first Instacart because that was the only thing that I could really track exactly what I purchased," he told Business Insider.
White said he was motivated to try the feature after another TikTok user posted an outlandish story about their Walmart+ order tripling in price in just the past two years. (Several commenters suggested this was due to the app replacing some out-of-stock items with more expensive offerings from third-party sellers.)
Even though price increases have slowed significantly in recent months, the cumulative inflation in the past five years is about 23%, meaning that what once cost $1 now costs $1.23.
But that figure is calculated across a lot of different spending categories, and groceries, in particular, have seen some uneven increases during that time.
Add a dose of shrinkflation to the mix, and it can take a bit of work to replicate a past cart's contents on a unit-per-dollar basis.
"A lot of the items either have changed names, or the quantity or the weight has changed, so it doesn't exactly translate," White explained. "So I actually had to go through each individual item and place it into my cart."
White noted that his penchant for lox (which more than doubled in price for him) accounted for much of his cart's increase, but he told BI that national brand items like the 12-pack of Pepsi and the Pedigree dog food packed a punch too.
By way of comparison, BI analyzed two other past Instacart orders from editorial staff in Los Angeles and New York City.
The first — preparing for a pandemic Passover meal in 2020 from Gelson's in LA — had a subtotal of $76.24 before taxes, tip, and fees. That order now costs $93, an increase of 22% that is almost exactly in line with overall inflation during that time.
The second — a frugal-but-balanced basket from Wegman's in Manhattan — came out to a subtotal of $89 in May of 2022, jumping to nearly $105 today: a 17% increase that far exceeds the official 7% inflation effect during that time.
White told BI the response to his video, which has nearly a million views, has been very polarized.
"People are super divided on the issue," he said. "Some people are saying that it's inflation. Some people are saying that it's corporate greed. I think that it might be a little combination of both."
For his part, White says the upward march of grocery bills led him to start growing his own produce in his backyard.
"We're teaching our almost two-year-old daughter how to garden," he said, "It's also saving us a lot of money."
Graphics contributed by Andy Kiersz.
