We’ve all arrived at the checkout with a bag of snacks and been surprised by the price. It’s a bad feeling to have to give up one of your favorite bags of chips to save a few bucks.
But when your basic food shopping suffers, it’s far worse than reducing your midnight munchies.
And economic concerns are making shopping for necessities at the supermarket a bit more difficult.
To demonstrate how awful things have become, a TikTok user named Carenstino decided to make a video depicting how $100 worth of food works out for him.
To emphasize his suffering, he captioned the video, saying that he is practically shaking from disbelief. Something must be done.
He adds that after going food shopping for ‘very basic’ products, this is getting out of hand. It has gotten to the point that individuals can’t survive.
Carenstino displays his shopping haul, which takes up a very tiny area on the vast kitchen island, and explains that it totaled $100.
“You’re telling me this is $100? This isn’t even barely enough to feed me for a couple of days,” he says.
He displays a tiny pack of chicken, a dozen eggs, rice, juices, body wash, deodorant, English muffins, stationery, and canned energy drinks.
“$100 for this? Excuse me?” He asks the camera, clearly surprised.
Even if you attempt to envision how much this shop would cost in your local grocery store, the price is unlikely to be that high.
Yes, there’s a possibility he got the products from a more upscale shop where they’d be a bit more expensive, but a hundred dollars still sounds excessive.
TikTok fans expressed their disbelief in the video’s comments, with one writing: “I used to make family dinner for $40 six years ago.” The same exact supper now costs $90.”
Another person said, “Grocery prices have become absurdly high.”
One user even said, “We’ve literally hit the point where it’s now cheaper to eat out.”
Others suggested shopping at Aldi or Trader Joe’s to save money.
Groceries were 5.8 percent more costly in May than a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index. However, new data suggests that they are finally beginning to simmer.