The pace of food price growth has already slowed dramatically over the past year. President-elect Donald Trump is acknowledging it may be difficult to bring down grocery prices, despite making it a key tenet of his presidential campaign. In an interview with Time magazine, which named him person of the year for 2024, Trump said he nevertheless believes it’ll happen through lower energy costs and supply chain improvements. Asked whether his presidency would be a “failure” if grocery prices don’t come down, Trump responded it would not, while blaming the Biden administration for the way it handled the inflation that led to higher food prices in the first place. “Look, they got them up. I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard,” he said in the interview published Thursday. “But I think that they will. I think that energy is going to bring them down. I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down. You know, the supply chain is still broken. It’s broken,” Trump said. Trump has promised to further increase American energy production. It is already at all-time highs. He also did not specify how he

Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits is the 10th-largest privately held company in the U.S., generating about $26 billion in revenue from sales to retail customers in 2023. The Federal Trade Commission in a new lawsuit accuses the largest U.S. distributor of wine and spirits of illegal price discrimination that gave large chains — among them Costco, Kroger and Total Wine & More — much better prices than those offered to neighborhood grocery stores, convenience shops and independent liquor stores. The distributor, Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits, is the tenth largest privately held company in the United States, generating about $26 billion in revenues from sales to retail customers in 2023, the FTC said Thursday in announcing the suit. The complaint says Southern, which distributes around 5,600 wine and spirit brands, deprived smaller businesses of access to discounts and rebates, harming their ability to compete with large national and regional chain stores. The suit alleges the distributor violated the Robinson-Patman Act by providing “steep discounts” without any market justification to a certain set of retailers. “When local businesses get squeezed because of unfair pricing practices that favor large chains, Americans see fewer choices and pay higher prices — and communities suffer,” said FTC Chair Lina Khan in a statement.

Trump’s universal tariff proposals could cause prices on clothing, toys, furniture, household appliances, footwear and travel goods to skyrocket. The economy is doing “exceptionally well” as President-elect Donald Trump gets ready to enter the White House, according to Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. Zandi, speaking at the Consumer Federation of America’s financial services conference on Wednesday, noted some of the glowing areas: Gross domestic product has been growing at around 3%, productivity and business formation rates are strong, and the stock market is up. “The economy can weather a lot of storms,”Zandi said. But, he added, “I do think there are some potential storms coming” next year under the new administration. Immigration policy, tariffs could affect economy Zandi expects Trump to act quickly on deporting immigrants and implementing tariffs, two moves that could have profound impacts on the U.S. economy. “I believe President Trump is going to do what he said he’ll do on the campaign trail,” Zandi said. “He’s going to be quite aggressive in pursuing the policies.” Immigration has played a big role in the economy’s strength, Zandi said. Others agree. “Recent immigrants have flowed disproportionately into the parts of the labor force that were particularly tight in 2022, contributing to labor supply in places where it was most badly needed,” Goldman Sachs analysts

There are two primary reasons for the surge: bird flu, which has reduced egg supply, and the strong consumer holiday season demand. It’s for grocery shoppers, as the price of those Grade A eggs has spiked in recent months, just two years after egg prices soared to record highs. The average retail price of eggs in the U.S. has risen 38% since November 2023, according to consumer price index data issued Wednesday. Prices rose 8% last month alone. A carton of a dozen large Grade A eggs cost $3.65 in November, up from $2.14 a year earlier, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. There are two primary reasons for the surge: bird flu, which has reduced egg supply, and the strong consumer demand that’s typical around the winter holiday season, according to economists and market analysts. “There’s a very real chance we could flirt with record highs” for prices, said Brian Moscogiuri, vice president of Eggs Unlimited, an egg supplier. Grade A egg prices peaked at $4.82 a dozen in January 2023, having jumped from $1.93 in January 2022. At a time of high pandemic-era inflation, eggs were a standout, with an annual inflation rate of 60% in calendar-year 2022, according to CPI data. They even

The grocery store operators had said they’d be able to cut prices by combining, but regulators and courts disagreed. Now they’re investing in stock buybacks. Within a day of their $25 billion merger’s falling apart in court, Kroger and Albertsons were each planning to move forward with share repurchases to boost their stock prices and reward investors. America’s two largest grocery store operators had argued that they’d be better able to lower prices for shoppers by joining forces. Doing so, they said, would boost their negotiating power with suppliers and make it easier to take on much bigger retailers that compete with them in grocery sales, such as Walmart, Costco and Amazon. The Biden administration disagreed, with the Federal Trade Commission saying in a lawsuit countering the merger that the deal threatened to drive down workers’ wages and bargaining power and reduce industry competition, potentially pushing food prices higher. With the deal now dead, it’s impossible to know whether any of that would have happened. But U.S. District Judge Adrienne Nelson of Oregon sounded a note of skepticism, writing in her decision Tuesday that the chains’ promises to invest in lower prices were “neither merger-specific nor verifiable, so there is no guarantee” that