High food and gasoline prices are impacting where and how people across the nation are shopping for food.
The cost of groceries jumped by 9.5 percent in February over last year’s prices and the average gallon of gas was $3.39.
As a result, some customers at a Dollar General store in North Central Florida are buying more and more of their groceries from the local discount outlet, cashiers at the business told The Epoch Times.
The high cost of gas “makes trips to town expensive,” said one store worker.
A cashier said shoppers are purchasing only enough groceries to last two or three days.
“It’s almost like a pay-as-you-go—maybe they don’t have the money to put it all out at once” to buy food for longer than that, said one clerk.According to store employees, the most popular items sold are eggs, bread, lunchmeat, frozen dinners, and frozen vegetables.
A survey of 50,000 households by the American Public Health Association found that between 2008 and 2020, dollar stores were already capturing the lion’s share of new growth in family food spending making them, by that narrow measurement, the fastest-growing food retailers in the nation.
And the trend appears to be accelerating as inflation rages.
