During the rise of Covid-19 and the pandemic, food prices increased by nearly 30% since 2019. Some causes for this was because of global lockdowns limiting trade between countries and the cost of transportation rising leading retailers to raise prices to compensate for it. The other causes for the high food prices are due to the global issues around the world like the bird flu that caused egg prices to increase by 20% and the Russia-Ukraine war that has heavily impacted Ukraines export goods like grain and oilseeds. These are all reasonable explanations to why some products have increased to such high prices, but the high prices for some goods aren’t necessarily all caused by these issues. I come from a single parent home where my mother has to work hard to support me and my sister. The increase of food prices has caused us to spend nearly double of what we used to pay for half the food we are able to get at the same price. This has caused my family to stop buying unnecessary snacks and products and focus on only buying the essentials and what can last us a long time. But even with these changes in our spending habits, we still walk out of grocery stores with fewer bags that cost more than what they should have been. Yet as my family and many others struggled to get a hold of toilet paper and had to eat off rice and pasta dishes for days, many large corporations saw huge profits in shares during a time of crisis. I can see how companies made a profit during the pandemic because they had to raise prices to account for limited supplies as people panicked and bought things in bulk. But it’s been nearly five years since then yet prices have not seen a significant decrease in price despite people buying less than what they have ever bought before. I see this as monopiles capitalizing on people needing to have certain products and then raising prices because either way, people will buy the goods regardless of how much they cost. There have been many investigations into major retailers like Kroger, Walmart, and Amazon that have shown where these companies used rising costs as an opportunity to price gouge consumers during Covid-19, further hiking prices and increasing their profits at people’s expense. This makes me sick to my stomach that we as consumers have to spend so much of our money and savings on essential items that large companies decide to make us pay more to further increase their pockets.
Work Cited
Perkins, Tom. “Half of Recent US Inflation due to High Corporate Profits, Report Finds.” The Guardian, 19 Jan. 2024, www.theguardian.com/business/2024/jan/19/us-inflation-caused-by-corporate-profits.
Crezo, Adrienne. “Why Are Groceries so Expensive? What You Need to Know.” Center for Science in the Public Interest, 20 Dec. 2024, www.cspinet.org/cspi-news/why-are-groceries-so-expensive-what-you-need-know.
Bhattarai, Abha, and Jeff Stein. “Inflation Has Fallen. Why Are Groceries Still so Expensive?” Washington Post, 3 Feb. 2024, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/02/grocery-price-inflation-biden/.CNBC. “Why Food Prices Are Still so High in the U.S.” YouTube, 4 Jan. 2025, www.youtube.com/watch?v=22StbCBvWLg.
Reflection
This was the last major writing I did for my English class that was about writing my own op-ed essay on a topic of my choosing. I chose to write about how large corporations are taking advantage of consumers and had to make rhetorical moves to help validated my claim. I would say I was able to show my stance on the matter and had proved valid information to back my claim but didn’t execute as best I should have. It would have been better to spite this one big essay into paragraphs to help better understand and categorized the information for the reader as the essay didn’t “flow” right and made it confusing for people to follow along with what I was saying.