‘Rockets and feathers’: Economists say grocery prices shoot up like the first, fall like the second
Economics has a term for what U.S. grocery prices have done in recent years: rockets and feathers.Recommended Video Rockets, because the cost of food eaten at home zoomed up in the aftermath of the pandemic. Feathers, because once prices rise, they’re slow to come down. That’s been frustrating for Americans hit with the sharpest increase in grocery prices in 50 years.
- ▪Economics has a term for what U.S. grocery prices have done in recent years: rockets and feathers.Recommended Video Rockets, because the cost of food eaten at home zoomed up in the aftermath of the pandemic.
- ▪Feathers, because once prices rise, they’re slow to come down.
- ▪That’s been frustrating for Americans hit with the sharpest increase in grocery prices in 50 years.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/2026/07/25/grocery-prices-rockets-feathers-inflation/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 25 Jul 2026 13:48:57 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-25T14:22:18.438Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-25T14:22:18.438Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 9SIhsMfCuj07 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Economics has a term for what U.S. grocery prices have done in recent years: rockets and feathers.Recommended Video Rockets, because the cost of food eaten at home zoomed up in the aftermath of the pandemic. Feathers, because once prices rise, they’re slow to come down. That’s been frustrating for Americans hit with the sharpest increase in grocery prices in 50 years. While food price inflation peaked in 2022, when prices jumped 11.4%, prices have not reversed course. An acceleration in flation after the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran has prolonged the aggravation.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
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