(Bloomberg) -- Online grocery prices declined in October from a year earlier, the first such drop since the arrival of Covid more than four years ago.
Food costs fell 0.1% from the same period of 2023, according to data from Adobe that’s based on about 1 trillion visits to retail sites and more than 100 million products purchased. The last time they posted an annual decline was in January 2020.
The post-pandemic spike in the cost of living — especially in food prices, which disproportionately hurt low-income Americans — has squeezed household budgets, and helped drive former President Donald Trump’s election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last week.
Adobe’s gauge of online grocery prices has generally moved in parallel with the government’s Consumer Price Index for food at home. That measure stood at 1.3% in September, after peaking above 13% in 2022. Since the pandemic, US shoppers are increasingly buying more of their groceries online.
Overall, the Adobe Digital Price Index declined 2.9% from the previous year. Among the 18 categories tracked by Adobe, two-thirds of them are now in deflationary territory. Online apparel prices fell an annual 9.9% in October, and have now declined for 14 consecutive months, according to the report. In the official CPI measure, apparel prices rose 1.8% in the 12 months through September. The October CPI report will be published on Wednesday.
Adobe has been tracking online prices since 2014. In October, US consumers spent $82 billion in e-commerce purchases, according to the report.
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