Overnight price increase

One nice thing about blogging is that it gives me some benchmarks to work with. Apparently, at the beginning of the year, boneless skinless chicken breast was $1.98/# at Winco. A bit later in January it jumped to $2.18/#…and increase of almost 10%. Today at Winco I was met with this:

Thats right, kids…it jumped sixty cents a pound in one swoop. Thats’s an overnight increase of 28%. Or, if you start with January, a 40% increase in chicken in six months. Put another way, if you spent the same amount of money as you did in January to buy 30 days worth of chicken, you’d only get about 21 says worth of chicken now.

So, unless you got a 40% raise in the last six months, you are gonna be at a net loss chicken-wise.

It must have been a very recent price increase because there were still a few lower-priced trays left:

Other than gas prices, this has been the most in-your-face thing I’ve seen. And this will be happening on everything.

31 thoughts on “Overnight price increase

  1. Yeah, the “8% inflation rate” is total B.S. It’s at least double that – maybe more.

    I was restocking laundry detergent (I’ve been buying the same thing for years), and noted the volume decreased by 10%, yet the price still *increased* by 10%, which is better than 20% inflation.

  2. I don’t use chicken breast so I really haven’t noticed. I just checked online and the local chain has it for 2.99/lb. I think I used to see it for about 1.99. Legs and thighs can still be had for 1 to 1.49 /lb
    But you’re right. The small increases on many items start to make a big increase.

  3. that’s capitalism. Same thing with infant formula, pure capitalism fails when it is being run by people who only have their interests in play and no contingency plan in place when things go sideways. ‘what do you mean people are out sick and others resigned? Daddy didn’t tell me what to do about this’

    • Then it’s not “pure capitalism”, is it?
      “Same thing happened with baby formula” didn’t just “happen”, it was designed & implemented by government to be a near monopoly on baby formula and who gets first dibs – namely, ADFC & others that vote democrat..

      • our financial system is to capitalism the way Nancy Pelosi resembles a hot date. Corporate welfare is run by people that vote republican.

  4. We had been paying $1.99 a lb for a couple years, with occasional sales better, but it almost entirely disappeared for a couple months and now is thin on the shelves at $2.99 or more. There are times when the only fresh chicken available is costly organic…
    Have you seen the price of eggs recently? They’re zooming up even worse.

    • Chicken flu is allowing the decimation of flocks around the world(again for the 3rd-4th time). They just get sick and recover but is a excuse to destroy flocks-like they did with hoof and mouth to beef/pork. Just remember THEY WANT YOU DEAD

    • Agree with egg prices, less than a year ago, I was paying less than $2 for a dozen jumbos. Now price is nearly $4 for same product. Really have to shop around to find deals, but with cost of gasoline, places have to be close. Grain cost is raising havoc with backyard chicken coops too. Anything with limited shelf life is going way up.

  5. Don’t feel bad. Aldi’s just went from $1.99 to $2.49 lb. But limit 2. It just means I’m going to starve before you no matter how much money I have.

    • Well, go back every day for 2 packs until your budget says STOP, they’re out or you hit your storage limit/goal amount.

      The few times we’ve had this issue I stopped in after work (late afternoon to early evening). A couple extra visits let us hit the budget/goal point.

      Steelheart

  6. Albertsons has had boneless skinless thighs on sale for $1.99 all month. I buy as much as I can and can them in 1 pint wide mouth jars. Normally you can get 2 pieces per jar. This is part of my meal plan where I plan 7 simple meals, one for each day of the week. Chicken casserole is Wednesday’s meal plan, 1 pint of chicken, 1 pound of noodles, one can of peas x52 weeks gets me Wednesday covered for a year.

  7. Yeah; this happened out here in the West a few months back. We used to get boneless chicken breasts on special at $1.19/lb. Now it’s $3.49/lb… ON SPECIAL!!! Worse yet, I’ve had to call a moratorium on frozen food purchases because Southern California Edison and Nanny Newsom decided to raise our rates… BY 63%!!! So even if we get a good price on meat, the longer it sits in the freezer, the more expensive it becomes. We’re trying to whittle down our frozen foods enough to shut off one of the freezers because of this.

    In other news, it just cost me $32.00 for 5.6 gallons of regular gas…

    I am SO ready to “push back…”

  8. Our Wally went up over $2/lb last year for GV boneless-skinless and was $2.18 last September and jumped straight to $2.97 (36%) earlier this year so consider yourself still lower priced. (Middle of country)

    I’m regularly tracking price increases of 30-35% and that has not considered their “tricks” of same package size but far less product, more liquid less product, etc. 8% my eye!

    The highest I’ve seen was a Wally delivery case price of GV canned chicken that went from just under $20 for case of 12 of their 12 ounce cans to $35.30 — over 77% increase. It WAS a heck of a buy at that $20. IIRC WAS $1.66 and now is 2.94 each (in the case)

    Wally large eggs 18 count went from $2.43 to $4.23 in one jump (74%) but they dropped to $4.06 now.

    NOW Jif just had a massive recall. https://www.jif.com/recall

    Another source of protein……surprise!

    P.S. What is LARPING? (Previous headline)

    • Oh, forgot to mention— checked entire area last night and ZERO availability on the chicken breasts at that time (admittedly after Saturday’s shoppers)

      • Dude!
        Google is NOBODY’s friend. 😉

        I thought it was a
        “Commanderism”.

        Lots of acronyms— same letters different meanings.

  9. The majority of price increase can be traced directly back to the increase in price and increasing scarcity of fuel. It’s all directly related, with the exception of very few things you can obtain locally as in locally grown food items, produce, or home made or manufactured goods, etc,. from your local farmers market, every single thing you buy travels by energy consumption of one form or another. This is directly related to the “globalization” of trade and the creation of “big box stores” obtaining their wares from countries having the lowest labor costs.
    The pandemic should have woken everyone up to this fact when the overlords insisted on shutting local, small business, and mom & pop operations down but insisting that the big box stores stay open. Apparently you could catch covid at a mom & pop faster than at a big box store with countless people visiting it. Yeah ….. riiiiight…. It’s the intentional killing of a country.

  10. This post got me curious, so I checked. I pulled a four pack of chicken thighs (bone and skin) from Dillon’s. Tyson brand. These were purchased in January at $1.04 a pound. Today they are $1.75 a pound.

  11. Just filled minivan, but there’s a $75 limit on buying gas, so I got to do that dance twice 🙂

  12. I needed some gas for my gennie, so I took the five gallon can to the gas station. I’d filled my truck’s tank yesterday, so all I was going to buy was the 5 gallons. I reflexively thought “I should pay cash, the amount will be too small to use a credit card…” then the new normal hit me, and I realized it would be over $20…

    Funny when habit and out of date ways of thinking will jump up and smack you. Something to look out for as we continue this evolution- be sure your old ‘rules of thumb’ are still valid.

    nick

    Oh, chicken thighs and legs went from $1 per pound to $1.10 again. There’s a lot of resistance to crossing that $1/pound price point. Oddly, frozen turkey was still $1.28 a pound. It’s been that for a few years at my local grocery, same brand, and the same price, without any fluctuation that I’ve noticed. Butterball comes and goes, and the price changes, but the Riverstone or whatever the brand really is just stays the same.

  13. Wife came home Saturday morning after doing some shopping. She exclaimed “Inflation has hit everything!” What she doesn’t realize is that we put stuff up for years now. Also she voted for the price increase.

    • That’s why women weren’t allowed to vote until FDR. They almost always vote socialism/strong man. Takes lots of proper schooling to teach them about reality, and most still vote their hormones, and then bitch about the results.

      • When women were given the vote in 1920, Woodrow Wilson was President. FDR wouldn’t be President for another 13 years.

  14. Chicken thighs went on sale at 99 cents/lb. I filled the freezer…

    I do not understand this fixation on boneless skinless chicken breasts. What’s the point of buying a bird part with no flavor? Keep the bone, keep the skin, keep the flavor.

    • or buy a whole chicken a lot cheaper get a knife and make it into what you want.

      • jimbo: I tried dissecting a bird and vacuum-packing/freezing the results. It wasn’t pretty. Crunching the numbers, I realized it’s (well, was- dunno about currently) cheaper to just buy the bird parts rather than a whole bird as the intact clucker is more expensive per pound.

      • Here whole birds are the same price as parts, and I have to do something with the breast which no one in the family likes. That plus my time, and the vac seal, is a significant % net loss over buying thighs or legs at costco in the heavy vac pack.

        I buy bulk and repack lots of meat, but chicken doesn’t make sense.
        n

    • A large roasting hen in my house is several nice meals between the two of us. Then the carcass is slow boiled, simmered then cooled for manual deboning. An AWESOME rich chicken stock for again a nice chicken soup and more for flavoring beans and rice.

      For me and mine the roasting hen or thighs beats nearly tasteless chicken breasts.

  15. A large roasting hen in my house is several nice meals between the two of us. Then the carcass is slow boiled, simmered then cooled for manual deboning. An AWESOME rich chicken stock for again a nice chicken soup and more for flavoring beans and rice.

    For me and mine the roasting hen or thighs beats nearly tasteless chicken breasts.

  16. Here in the NC mountains a short while ago we went through a shortage of boneless chicken breast where one of the 4 grocery stores in the area had any on the shelf. they had 2 packs of bone in skin on chicken for over $4.00 per pound. That lasted less than a week and then supply returned to normal and the price for boneless chicken breast was and has remained at $1.99 per pound which is up from the price of $1.79 per pound a few months back.

    We use a lot of boneless chicken as well as lean center cut pork loin which can be purchased on sale every couple weeks also for $1.99 which is likewise up from the $1.79 a few months back. Combined with the meat from the half a grass fed beef we purchased makes up the bulk of our meals. We are currently using up the last of chicken vacuum sealed and frozen back in the end of 2020 and early 2021. We also have a stock of frozen sealed chicken wings, roasting chickens, bacon and sausage stored away.

    We continue to purchase replacement meats when the price is right and vacuum seal it and date it. We have 4 freezers we keep stocked with the contents stored away by due dates. Any bones and scraps from chicken wings and roasters are kept and when we have enough we make up a large batch of bone broth which gets frozen in a Tupperware container to be removed and vacuum sealed and dated once it is frozen.

    There are still bargains to be had out there for now so we take advantage while we can. In addition we are raising our own flocks for eggs and future meat purposes. Right now we are able to supply 4 families with all the eggs they need.

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