CLEARWATER, Fla. — As consumers grapple with ongoing inflation in the Tampa Bay area, particularly with food, searching the store shelves for the lowest prices can be a bit of an art form.
"I watch for BOGOs,” said June Paciga, a shopper.
Nowadays, Paciga has noticed prices on certain items aren’t always what they used to be.
"When I see cage-free eggs at $5.40 something, that's high,” said Paciga.
It's a familiar story for many shoppers as inflation impacts their bottom line. Wallethub found Tampa-St. Pete-Clearwater is number two on their list of cities with the biggest inflation problems.
Denis Eymann, the Grocery Manager at Nature's Food Patch in Clearwater, weighed in on what they've seen when they have to stock their shelves.
"At the beginning of 2023, you might have noticed that egg prices went through the roof, and you couldn't even find eggs in some places, and the reason for that was bird flu that ran through the flocks of the hens that laid eggs for us, and that really put a lot of pressure on the price to go up. It's almost back to where it was before,” said Eymann. "Meat and fish, chicken, beef, all those prices have never really recovered from the inflation caused by the pandemic shortages. They've just remained high."
However, Eymann said it's a very competitive landscape in the grocery industry right now.
"While there is indeed inflation, and you will see inflation on the shelf, it won't be as bad as you've seen it before, and quite frankly, a lot of stores, us included, have started lowering prices to attract customers,” said Eymann.
Different foods have very different supply chains and very different impacts for going up, according to Piyush Shah, an Assistant Professor at the Lutgert College of Business at Florida Gulf Coast University.
The big lingering question: when shoppers might see relief at the grocery store?
Shah said we have a slight reduction in prices every winter, though he explained that logic is valid if you're outside of Florida.
"In Florida, what happens in winter, we have the influx of people, and we have a massive increase of population,” said Shah. “I don't see any decrease in prices in 2023, and the earliest I think I can see a reduction would be in probably March or April of 2024."