ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Inflation reared its ugly, egg-shaped head in the supermarket last month. Grocery prices jumped sharply in November, one of the biggest months of the year for home cooking. That's one of the takeaways from today's inflation report. NPR's Scott Horsley is here with the details. Hey, Scott.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: Hi, Ari.
SHAPIRO: Big family gatherings for Thanksgiving means grocery carts are especially full in November, so how much more did shoppers have to pay last month?
HORSLEY: Yeah, quite a bit more. Yeah, grocery prices jumped half a percent in November. That was the biggest one-month increase in almost two years. Now, it's not primarily the Thanksgiving turkey's fault. Turkey prices were up a little bit last month, but they're still down from a year ago. The big culprit, once again, was eggs. Egg prices jumped more than 8% in November. They're up more than 37% over the last 12 months. Food economist David Ortega at Michigan State University says we're just still paying a price for bird flu, which has sidelined a lot of the nation's laying hens.
DAVID ORTEGA: We are also in the midst of the holiday season, where eggs are a key ingredient for a lot of the holiday baking - the cookies, the pies that we all make. And so when you have constraints on the supply side and increase in demand for a product like eggs, prices have nowhere to go but up.
HORSLEY: And it's particularly tough because there's no real substitute. You know, if beef prices go up, you can switch to chicken or pork. But if Grandma's Christmas cookie recipe calls for eggs, you just got to shell out.
SHAPIRO: Yeah, shell out - oh. All right, we've been hearing complaints about grocery prices for a long time, certainly the entire presidential campaign. I have to ask what we've been asking for more than a year now. Is there a break in sight?
HORSLEY: Well, we're not likely to see a big drop in grocery prices, but, you know, for much of the last year, we didn't see a big increase either. Overall, grocery prices are up less than 2% over the last 12 months, so this has not been a big driver of inflation during that time. Of course, people are still really unhappy though about the cumulative price hikes at the supermarket since the beginning of the pandemic. During that time, grocery prices have jumped more than 26%, narrowly outpacing wage gains during that time. And President-elect Trump told NBC this past weekend that's one of the big reasons he thinks he's going back to the White House.
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DONALD TRUMP: The groceries - when you buy apples, when you buy bacon, when you buy eggs, they would double and triple the price over a short period of time. And I won an election based on that.
HORSLEY: Now, Trump has promised to lower prices, but Ortega notes some of his proposed policies could have the opposite effect. We import a lot of our produce from Mexico, for example. Tariffs would make that more expensive. And, you know, mass deportations would hurt U.S. farmers who depend on immigrant workers, many of whom are undocumented.
SHAPIRO: Apart from groceries, what's going on with other costs of living?
HORSLEY: Well, overall prices in November were up 2.7% from a year ago. That's a slightly bigger increase than the month before. However, we are starting to see some long-awaited relief on the housing front. You know, rents are still going up but not as fast as they had been. In fact, November's rent increase was the smallest in more than three years. Economist Kathy Bostjancic of Nationwide says that should come as some relief to the inflation watchdogs over at the Federal Reserve and allow the Central Bank to cut interest rates again when policymakers meet next week. After that, though, Bostjancic thinks the Fed is going to proceed cautiously.
KATHY BOSTJANCIC: We think that the Fed will actually pause for a bit early next year to get a better sense of what policy changes for administration on trade, tariffs and immigration, deregulation.
HORSLEY: Bostjancic thinks we will see further easing of inflation next year and more rate cuts from the Fed but maybe not as many rate cuts as forecasters were expecting a few months ago.
SHAPIRO: NPR's Scott Horsley. Thank you.
HORSLEY: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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