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[Retrograde]

25. Grocery prices have always varied widely

depending on where you are, what the store has to pay for labor and its physical plant, what's in season, local costs of living, etc.

The store I usually shop at is a family-owned one (of a chain of two) in a California town notorious for its high real estate prices. Pre-epidemic, it was on the way home from the local senior center and next door to my husband's retirement gig, so it was convenient as it didn't require a separate shopping trip. When I used to go back to Western New York to look after my mother for a few weeks at a time, I noticed that prices at my family's favorite store were regularly much cheaper: the strawberries grown less than 100 miles from where I live were about 25% less in New York than what I pay for them here, even though they were trucked across the country.

Unless you're comparing national brands of processed, packaged foods it's hard to really compare since meat, fish, and produce are the most variable items. In Western New York, for example, veal was priced about the same as beef, since it's a big dairy region; out here it's a lot more expensive when you can find it at all.