NPR shopped for 96 items at Walmart to track how prices are really changing

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Analysis Business
NPR shopped for 96 items at Walmart to track how prices are really changing

January 14, 2025 • 5:00 AM ET
By Alina Selyukh, Juweek Adolphe


This photo shows a shopping cart in a store aisle filled with groceries. The cart is filled with items including bagels, grapes, salmon and juice. The shelves lining the aisle are filled with bags of potato chips, candy and other packaged nonperishable foods.
NPR has tracked the prices of dozens of items at one Walmart in Georgia over multiple years.
Alina Selyukh/NPR

LIBERTY COUNTY, Ga. — Ask almost any shopper outside this sprawling Walmart southeast of Savannah, and they'll tell you about rising prices. ... "The meat is going up. Milk, eggs, everything is going up," says Cicely Gardner, rolling a cart with some doughnuts in the parking lot. ... But wait. The rate of inflation has cooled for two years, and not everything is going up in price. So why does paying at checkout still cause such heartburn? What gives?

NPR set off to answer that question at the most popular retailer in the United States. For six years, we have tracked the prices of dozens of items at this very Walmart superstore. And here's what we learned on our latest visit, in December. (Or skip the analysis to see the full details of NPR's shopping cart.)

On average, prices ticked up 0.7% last year

NPR's list includes 96 items from virtually every Walmart aisle: chips and veggies, shampoo and T-shirts, dog food and paper towels. To account for changes in package sizes, we focus on the price per unit, typically per ounce, whether it's toothpaste in a tube or soup in a can.

Over the course of 2024, the tracked prices on average increased just 0.7% — far less than overall annual inflation, which was 2.7% in November. (December's inflation data will be released on Wednesday.) ... That's because exactly half of our tracked prices stayed the same from December 2023 to December 2024 — a notable relief after the COVID-19 pandemic, when most prices jumped year to year because of turmoil in supply chains and labor markets.

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