Fox Business host Charles Payne and QI founder and CEO Danielle DiMartino Booth on Tuesday compared the prices of kielbasa and bratwurst to beef as a way to explain how consumers are substituting related products to save money because of inflation.
Since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris took office in January 2021, prices have risen by 20%, while the Consumer Price Index (CPI) reached a high of 9% in June 2022. DiMartino Booth told Payne that consumers shifting from beef to “dinner sausages,” as reported by the Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey from the Dallas Federal Reserve, was “a sign of the times.”
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“It is saying something that families are trading down, if beef was for dinner, now it is sausage, they’re trying to stretch their budgets,” Booth added. “Good for Carl Kuby, he is selling more sausage. No, definitely a sign of the times. We’ve seen the labor market here in Texas deteriorate faster than that of the rest of the country.”
Retail prices for beef are between $4.81 and $10.06, according to Selina Wamucii, while the average price for sausages was between $1.78 and $2.22.
Harris proposed allowing the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to impose “harsh penalties” for “price gouging” by grocery stores in order to address increased food prices during an August 16 economic policy speech in North Carolina that drew criticism from The Washington Post’s editorial board and columnist Catherine Rampell.
A report released by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in May said that “markup fluctuations have not been a main driver of the ups and downs of inflation during the post-pandemic recovery.”
“After the show I will give you a call about some of those sausages,” Payne told Booth. “You just made me real hungry.”
Featured Image Credit: Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics
