Obama and Romney should visit grocery stores to know the pain

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Updated: March 3, 2012 11:33AM

I’d love to go grocery shopping with Barack Obama or Mitt Romney. The nearby Jewel, though, would have to do instead of the pricier Whole Foods.

As we in the 99 percent already know, they might find shopping for food to be a terrific learning experience.

I’ve been doing the family grocery shopping for years. You could say I’m a seasoned shopper with a knack for finding discounts.

My wife writes the list and I hit the store. Most of the time, I take a quick look at the list and then buy whatever I can remember, which is usually most of what my wife had in mind except for one or two critical things.

Understandably, this bugs my wife. But if Obama or Romney were to take me up on my offer, I promise I’d stick to the list. They might even want to jot down all the prices as we go along, which would give them an even better idea of the price shock most Americans are feeling about now. Just about everything has jumped in price, groceries in particular.

In 2011, food prices increased 4.8 percent on average, with some of the highest increases — in the double digits — for staples like chicken and beef, according to the U.S. Labor Department.

I bet most of our politicos don’t know that the price for a pound of chicken in the Midwest jumped 17 percent to $1.50, or that a pound of ground beef climbed 18 percent to $3.75.

Almost a year ago, Obama told American companies not to worry about inflation if they were planning to expand their business. The president said: “We’re not seeing a broad-based inflation trend.”

But a trip to the Jewel might give Obama a very different perspective on the pain of higher prices.

As for Romney, a man so wealthy he makes the multi-millionaire Obama look middle class, we all know how the former Massachusetts governor likes to throw out bets for thousands of dollars. So I’ll bet him a dollar, as we walk the grocery aisles, that he has no idea how much a gallon of milk goes for.

Recently, I caught up with Pedro Jaso, a father of three young girls who lives in Cicero and does construction work. Jaso and his family were outside La Chiquita supermarket, ready to do their weekly grocery shopping.

“Lately, everything is more expensive,” Jaso told me. “We used to pay $150 for groceries every week. Now we are paying $250.”

Jaso also said that his family has had to cut down on spending to make ends meet.

“There is not a lot of work out there,” he said. “We used to spend more on entertainment or a vacation, but not anymore.”

Economists will tell you that higher food prices hit lower-income folks particularly hard because they must spend 30 percent of their earnings on groceries. But inflation is having an impact on all consumers. The latest national figures show a continuing restraint on spending.

Amid the debates, the stump speeches and the media interviews, maybe Obama and Romney can find the time to go grocery shopping with me.

They’d get a real taste of what most Americans are going through.