A top Biden economic adviser on Thursday pressed on with the administration’s recent effort to go after grocery stores and food companies over elevated prices, as inflation remains a major worry for voters as November’s presidential election nears.
“Grocery prices, they are important to people because they pay those prices every week,” said Lael Brainard, director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, during a news conference at a National Association for Business Economics event in Washington, D.C.
“We’ve seen in consumer brands, that in a lot of cases, they are effectively raising unit prices, but masking it by shrinking packaging, and it’s important to call that out and to use the tools we have to go after that. And, you know, I think for the grocery stores and chains that raised their margins during the height of the pandemic, it’s time to bring those down.”
Lael Brainard, director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, speaks with reporters Thursday at a National Association for Business Economics conference in Washington, D.C.
MarketWatch/Victor Reklaitis
The comments from Brainard came after Biden criticized some companies on Super Bowl Sunday for how they’re pricing snack foods, with the president saying in a video that he’s “had enough of what they call ‘shrinkflation’ — it’s a rip-off.”
Thanks in part to elevated prices, Biden’s job-approval ratings have been stuck around the 40% mark for months even as a wide range of traditional indicators show the U.S. economy is in good shape.
What’s more, 51% of swing-state voters said in a recent poll that they trusted the likely Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, over Biden to handle the U.S. economy, while just 33% said Biden would be better.
Brainard also talked Thursday about how Americans can push back on elevated prices by shifting where they spend their money.
“Certainly people are fed up with high prices, and they want to see — they can see — the economy is really back to normal, and the prices of many things that they buy on a weekly basis, groceries in particular, are not back to normal, and I think they’re choosing to shop in different ways,” said Brainard, who previously served as a Federal Reserve vice chair.
“We see a little bit of that, and that should help to pressure some margins in grocery for instance to come down, but we’re also going to do everything we can. President Biden is going to keep calling this issue out. We have tools that we will continue to use to go after deceptive practices, junk fees, hidden increases in prices like shrinking package sizes, while not being transparent about unit prices. So we’ll continue to help consumers be price sensitive and discriminating.”
And see: Kroger pledges to lower prices for consumers when its planned merger with Albertsons closes
The main U.S. stock gauges
DJIA
SPX
were mostly higher Thursday as a report on retail sales helped soothe investor anxiety about inflation.
