WASHINGTON — In detailing her presidential campaign’s economic agenda, Vice President Kamala Harris will highlight an argument that blames corporate price gouging for high grocery prices.
That message polls well with swing voters. It has been embraced by progressive groups, which regularly point to price gouging as a driver of rapid inflation or at least something that contributes to rapid price increases. Those groups cheered the announcement late Wednesday that Harris would call for a federal ban on corporate price gouging on groceries in an economic policy speech Friday.
But the economic argument over the issue is complicated.
Economists have cited a range of forces for pushing up prices in the recovery from the pandemic recession, including snarled supply chains, a sudden shift in consumer buying patterns, and increased customer demand fueled by stimulus from the government and low interest rates from the Federal Reserve. Most economists say those forces are far more responsible than corporate behavior for the rise in prices in that period.
Biden administration economists have found that corporate behavior has played a role in pushing up grocery costs in recent years — but that other factors have played a much larger one.
The Harris campaign announcement cited meat industry consolidation as a driver of excessive grocery prices, but officials did not immediately respond Thursday to questions about the evidence Harris would cite or how her proposal would work.
There are examples of companies telling investors in recent years that they have been able to raise prices to increase profits. But even the term “price gouging” means different things to different people.
To some, it means companies are using shortages as an opportunity to raise prices rapidly, taking advantage of an imbalance between supply and demand to rake in huge profits. That kind of behavior is common — even expected — in economics and tends to crop up when products become hard to get.
For others, “price gouging” suggests that companies are choosing to produce less — effectively keeping something in short supply — so that they can charge more. At least in theory, such a situation should be only temporary. New competitors should enter the market and provide products at a price people can afford. And some seem to use the term to mean that companies have been taking advantage of a moment of rapid inflation to pass through price increases of their own.
To understand exactly what role corporate profits played in the pandemic inflation burst, it’s worth revisiting how inflation played out.
Prices jumped starting in 2021 as factory shutdowns and supply chain problems caused shortages for some products — including cars and furniture — at the same time that pandemic relief checks and shifts in consumer behavior tied to the pandemic helped to fuel hot consumer demand for physical goods.
Inflation remained rapid in 2022, compounded by the start of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which helped to push up fuel and food prices. That year and in early 2023, it spread into a variety of service prices.
The price jumps were especially painful in categories like groceries. At their peak, in August 2022, prices for food at home climbed 13.5% compared with a year earlier.
And that matters to the typical household and voter. Economic research suggests the cost of groceries — which consumers buy regularly, seeing clearly posted prices — plays a hefty role in shaping Americans’ views of inflation.
But inflation has been slowing markedly over the past year and is now nearly back to its pace before the pandemic. The consumer price index climbed 2.9% in the year through July, data this week showed, the first time inflation has dipped below 3% since 2021.
As economists revisit why inflation reached such a rapid pace at its peak, some point to price gouging. It is clearly the case that corporate profits picked up sharply during the pandemic. And throughout 2022 and much of 2023, companies regularly talked about how much new pricing power they had and how they were trying to keep customers buying more “premium” products at heftier price points.
Researchers at the liberal Groundwork Collaborative in Washington produced a report in January calculating that corporate profit margins accounted for about half of U.S. inflation in the second half of 2023.
But companies were able to rake in those profits for a reason, some economists point out: Consumer demand was very strong. Fed and congressional efforts to boost households and businesses during the pandemic, like the $1,400 payments for individuals Biden signed as part of the economic rescue plan early in 2021, fueled consumption.
“If prices are rising on average over time and profit margins expand, that might look like price gouging, but it’s actually indicative of a broad increase in demand,” said Joshua Hendrickson, an economist at the University of Mississippi who has written skeptically of claims that corporate behavior is driving prices higher. “Such broad increases tend to be the result of expansionary monetary or fiscal policy — or both.”
As hot demand collided with strong supply, the economy operated more or less as one would expect, several economists said. Without enough goods to meet strong demand, companies began to charge as much as they could for what they did have to sell. Higher prices then prodded companies to produce more, which helped supply to recover and inflation to cool again.
“Egg prices went up last year — it’s because there weren’t as many eggs, and it caused more egg production,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard economist formerly in the Obama administration.
And even when it came to things like groceries, the jump in prices wasn’t all about corporate profits. The pandemic also spurred a rise in nominal worker wages, which has contributed to price increases. Researchers from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City reported last year that rapid job growth in the U.S. economy, and the wage increases that came with it, were major contributors to rising grocery prices.
Still, some economists suggest that in a world where supply shocks could be more frequent — with causes including trade wars, geopolitical instability and climate change — the government should find ways to prevent corporations from reacting to sudden supply shortages by sharply increasing prices.
Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said that shortages and higher raw material costs during the pandemic seemed to work like a coordination tool: Many companies found that they could charge more because their competitors were doing the same. That allowed them to maintain or even increase profits.
That could set a worrisome precedent, she said. In future shocks, companies may not feel much urgency to rapidly fix supply chain problems, aware that they can pull in big profits in the meantime.
And while the businesses are likely to ramp up production and lower prices in the longer term — they would eventually face consumer pushback or lose out to competitors — even a temporary period of very high inflation can be tough on the average person.
“If the worst of times for ordinary people ends up being the best of times for corporations,” she said, people may feel cheated. “Some sort of basic social contract is kind of crumpling.”
She applauded Harris’ plan to combat grocery price gouging.
But Furman said there was a risk that policies meant to curb corporate price gouging could instead keep the economy from adjusting. If prices do not rise in response to strong demand, new companies may not have as much inclination to jump into the market to ramp up supply.
“This is not sensible policy, and I think the biggest hope is that it ends up being a lot of rhetoric and no reality,” he said. “There’s no upside here, and there is some downside.”