Private brands are usually more profitable for stores. But now it's got its own store brand called Hyper Tough.
And with a screwdriver, we saw another common technique. And stores do sometimes lower prices of some items and then raise them elsewhere in the aisles, so maybe that's what happened. Argo, for example, told me they did not actually lower their corn starch prices, suggesting maybe Walmart did that. And last year, electronics were often overstocked. SIMON: Why did these prices drop? How can they arrange for that when everything is going up? SIMON: Really? Screwdriver's 60% cheaper? Yes, actually - Argo corn starch, a Vizio TV, garlic, shoelaces and a screwdriver, which got 60% cheaper since 2019. SELYUKH: That is the question everyone wants to know. SIMON: Alina, did you discover anything that got cheaper? And so experts say that if you're really intent on getting the best price, it's worth checking the price per unit, like item in a package or per ounce in this case.
SELYUKH: Unilever, which makes Dove, also didn't talk to me, but we found that now you have to pay almost the same amount of money for an eight-pack of this Dove soap as you would have spent on a 10-pack before the pandemic. Now it has shrunk by a quarter ounce, which you can't really see, but you can sort of guess since I am asking you about it. SELYUKH: So this very same bar of soap in 2019 used to weigh 4 ounces. SIMON: Well, it looks like a bar of soap. I brought something from our shopping cart that illustrates this perfectly. SIMON: Of course, that's when companies will put in fewer tissues into the box or fewer chips in a bag. And I do want to tell you about another thing that we saw that's kind of fascinating, which is shrinkflation. PepsiCo, which owns Quaker, did not talk to me, but I did find out that in 2021, a severe drought caused the worst oat harvest in North America since basically the end of the Civil War - pretty wild. For example, oatmeal - Quaker Oats saw one of the biggest price jumps in our basket, 73% since 2019. SIMON: Well, share a couple with us that you've discovered.
Many products have their own particular stories also. put on Chinese imports, then the pandemic chaos in the supply chains, wages finally starting to rise, wild swings in the cost of fuel, the war in Ukraine. And in this case, there were just so many of them - first, those tariffs the U.S. So when Walmart prices do change dramatically, they can reflect big shifts. SELYUKH: And one reason we chose Walmart, other than, you know, it's the most popular supermarket - it puts a huge focus on keeping prices stable day to day. Since pre-pandemic, prices in our shopping cart, on average, increased about 23%. We went back last month, and the big headline this year is kind of depressing, maybe not too surprising. And since then, we've been walking every aisle of this one Walmart store south of Savannah, tracking prices of dozens of items. SELYUKH: Yeah, so we started this project during the trade war with China. For the past four years, NPR has visited the same Walmart store to try to track prices, get insights into global trade and a ground-level look at the U.S. There's a story in every shopping cart, from the wood pulp in a roll of paper towels to fruits and vegetables that survived floods and droughts.
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