This story was originally published by The 19th.
Over the past four years, just about everyone has had a story about the eye-popping cost of an everyday grocery item. $9.99 for a pack of bacon? And since when, exactly, could a single box of cereal go for $6? A pack of hot dogs for $4?
Record price hikes have reshaped many Americans’ lives — possibly women most of all.
Women make the majority of consumer purchases across the country, and as prices started to rise in 2021, it was often women who watched numbers climb on stickers affixed to egg cartons, deals disappear and receipt totals skyrocket.
Many of those same women were also reeling from record unemployment in 2020, when more than 11 million women lost their jobs from March to April alone. It wouldn’t be until 2023 that those numbers fully recovered. Meanwhile, inflation peaked in 2022, caused by a combination of factors including factory shutdowns, Russia’s war with Ukraine and coronavirus stimulus payments. The Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation, rose from 1.5 percent in March 2020 to 9.1 percent in the summer of 2022. Now, the rate is at 2.4 percent, which means it’s not rising at the same speed, but the high prices that came with it have yet to return to prior levels. Americans still remember a not-so-distant time when the average price of a dozen Grade A eggs was about $1.50 or less, not more than the current $3. It could still take time for those expectations to adjust.
Stella Kalinina/The 19th
Stella Kalinina/The 19th
The one-two economic punch of job loss and high costs blew family budgets apart these last four years and forced new ways of living that will far outlive the crisis. There’s the resurgence of coupon clippers. There’s the canners and the new gardeners. And there’s those who had to take out loans or visit food banks for the first time.
All of those Americans, who have spent an entire four-year political cycle in financial instability, now return to the polls.
In the University of Michigan’s Study of Consumers, the longest-running report on consumer attitudes, women have consistently felt worse than men about the economy, and that continues to hold true even as inflation has leveled. According to a 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll, inflation and the cost of living ranks highest for voters when asked what issue matters most to them right now. Women (37 percent) polled slightly higher than men (36 percent) and nonbinary people (31 percent).
The 19th spoke to women whose lives were changed when jobs were lost and prices rose about the choices they made over the past several years, and how those choices may now shape their vote.
Ashley Trent – California In a food desert, providing for a family of seven by any means necessary.
Ashley Trent went to a food bank for the first time after her housing costs unexpectedly rose 77 percent and her food stamps were cut. Grocery prices were rising faster than she could bear. Trent and her family of seven, who live in a town tucked in California’s rural Antelope Valley, are about an hour’s drive from most grocery stores. With five boys to feed in this food desert, inflation has tested one of her basic roles as a parent: to provide.
Stella Kalinina/The 19th
Stella Kalinina/The 19th
The trouble started in 2022, when the Trents’ landlord sold the house they were living in, and they had to move to a more expensive rental. Rent soared from $1,130 to $1,995 a month as a result. After her husband got promotions at work, their food stamps were cut from $600 to nothing. Their spending at Walmart rose, ultimately doubling to $600 a month. They started draining their savings. Still, it wasn’t enough.
If they wanted to go to cheaper grocery stores, they’d have to factor in the extra gas it would take to get there — a two-hour ride, round-trip. And in 2022, fuel was at its highest recorded price: an average of $6.438 a gallon in California.
“You’re doing your budget for the month and you’re like, ‘How is it if I’m saving money, I don’t see it?’ I’m still spending that money on gas,” Trent said.
There were two food banks run by local churches where they could get pasta, rice and, when they were lucky, some fresh produce. By the next year, the Trents started going to them regularly.
“It was one of those times where I was like, I can be sad about it, I can be upset about it, but I have to do it,” Trent said. “My husband — men and their pride — he’d be like, ‘I’m so sorry.’ I’m like, ‘Babe, we are getting free food.’ I’m not too prideful, my ego is not too big. Hey, we need the help.”
It was something of a full circle moment for Trent. Both she and her husband work in social services, and usually they are providing community assistance rather than accepting it. Trent works as a housing navigator helping people, usually low-income seniors, find a place to live, acquire furniture and put together enough money for a security deposit. Her husband works with formerly incarcerated people. It was the first time the economy had left them behind.
Trent asked herself how it was that they made too much money for food stamps, but were relying on food banks. In April, Trent got a second part-time job educating children and adults with disabilities. They have more financial wiggle room now and have stopped going to food banks, but their grocery bills are still high and they have to be careful with their budget.
Stella Kalinina/The 19th
Stella Kalinina/The 19th
The past couple of years have shaped how Trent is thinking about the election in November, when she’s likely to vote for Kamala Harris, moved in part by Harris’ plan to tamp down corporations that are price gouging on groceries. More importantly, she said, she’s going to be focusing on her local election, because she now understands the direct effect local elected officials can have on the policies that shape her life, from taxes to her children’s education.
“We’ve already been in such a crisis — like crisis after crisis after crisis. I’m a millennial, so I grew up with 9/11 and everything else. I’m done with the crisis,” Trent said. “Can we get a year where it’s OK again?”
Kiersti Torok – Nebraska A return to couponing that skyrocketed her to TikTok fame.
When Kiersti Torok’s parents lost their jobs in the Great Recession, no one was hiring. They had two high school girls to support, so her mom attended a couponing course at a local community college that taught her how to find deals, stack different incentives and buy products when prices are lowest. Her mom was instantly hooked. Torok spent many weekends couponing with her mom, playing Backstreet Boys in the car with their $1 McDonald’s coffees on the way to Dollar Tree, where her mom would match sales she found in ad inserts with store rewards to get the best deals.
But she didn’t take up couponing herself in a big way until the pandemic, when history repeated itself: This time, she and her husband lost their jobs. Torok was a child care provider in Nebraska and her husband was a financial analyst — they were laid off within two days of each other in early 2020. They also had two kids to support.
That fall, Torok decided to turn her couponing tips into an Instagram account for friends and family. Walking into stores, she was conscious of the sales associates in the aisles with their binders, marking up prices. She’d run into friends in those aisles, too, many of whom had lost their jobs and were wondering how they’d afford diapers or formula. She knew what that felt like. Even though Torok’s husband found a new job later in 2020, they had little more than $200 a month for groceries.
Arin Yoon/The 19th
Arin Yoon/The 19th
Couponing was more difficult than it had been when she was a teenager: Manufacturers weren’t putting out as many, and fewer were high value. Old-fashioned coupons, clipped from the newspaper, were being replaced by digital ones, as well as apps that stores and third-party companies could use to offer rebates, discounts or customer rewards.
In the spring of 2021, she posted a video on TikTok responding to another user who had asked for the No.1 tip to save money. “Follow me,” she responded. She had grown up in poverty. She understood what it was like. But she realized that couponing needed a make-over.
“I’m gonna teach you how to coupon, and not the couponing that grandma did or the couponing you saw on TLC’s ‘Extreme Couponing,’” she said in her response on TikTok. “We are going to use digital coupons, we are going to use digital rebates, we are going to shop for clearance and we are going to shop for products at the right time when they’re the cheapest.”
It got 3.9 million views.
Today, Torok is one of the most recognizable couponers on the Internet. Her TikTok, Torok Coupon Hunter, is full of bubbly videos taking viewers with her into the aisles of Target, CVS and Sam’s Club and has 3.6 million followers. Her Instagram recently hit 1 million. One of her videos, about how she ensures that none of the products go to waste, because she sorts them via expiration date and donates items she doesn’t use, has more than 15 million views. Torok estimates couponing has saved her family tens of thousands of dollars.
She believes her videos have found such a strong following because she understands what it’s like to be a person — especially a parent — trying to provide for their family. “As a woman, as someone who lived in poverty, your voice is so diminished,” Torok said. But couponing lets her use her platform to help others. About 83 percent of her followers are women, about 90 percent are under the age of 35.
It’s no surprise most are millennials, like her, she said. “We’ve lived through 9/11 and the recession and the pandemic and COVID and now another recession that looks like it’s gonna be on the horizon. So we are a very money-conscious generation,” Torok said. “My mom and my dad, it was like this shameful thing to have to learn how to coupon. We’re kind of like, ‘Yeah, Sign me up.’”
Arin Yoon/The 19th
Arin Yoon/The 19th
This election year, she’s thinking about how politicians are speaking to people like her.
“I had my kids really young, we had no money, we didn’t have two pennies to rub together and we were trying to make it work. You do often feel left out by everyone,” Torok said. “I would just encourage people when they go to vote, to go vote for who they think hears them, who they think resonates with who they are.”
Laura Ganuzza – New Jersey She was once a luxury spender. Inflation “reformed” her.
In her old life, Laura Ganuzza was the kind of person high-end retailers loved. “Do you know Tiffany gives you a birthday gift if you shop a lot?” she asked, almost sounding embarrassed.
Until 2020, Ganuzza worked in corporate real estate in New York and earned six figures. She paid for her car in cash. She had a standing weekly manicure appointment, a bi-weekly pedicure and got her hair done every six weeks, plus she had two gym memberships — one in New York and one near her home in New Jersey. She had a laundry service, a dry cleaning service, a home cleaning service and a food delivery service, even though, most days, she just ate out. Back then, she couldn’t have told you what anything cost at the grocery store. She and her teenage daughter were spending $1,600 a month on food.
But none of that made her immune from the financial collapse brought on by COVID-19. She, like millions of others, lost her job. It was a financial wake-up call. And as prices started to climb, Ganuzza found herself looking at those grocery store stickers for the first time.
“I had to learn how much everything cost,” she said. “I attended YouTube University.”
The pandemic and the inflation that came after changed Ganuzza’s life. Even after she got a new job, she is now earning about half of what she did before. Her food budget dropped to $500 a month.
Now she thinks the $6 she was paying for pre-cut watermelons and $8 for pre-cut strawberries was a waste of money. She got a quart of strawberries for $1 the other day. A single can of black beans is $1.25, but if you buy them in bulk at Costco you can get them for 30 cents a can. Yes, the price of meat is up everywhere. But if you know where to look, you can get ground beef for $2.99 a pound instead of $3.99.
These days, treating herself “is going to BJs or Costco and buying a rotisserie chicken and the Stove Top stuffing and a mixed vegetable or salad,” Ganuzza said. She embraces it, calling herself a “reformed spender.”
“I get asked all the time: ‘Would you ever want to go back to your old life?’” she said. She doesn’t love cooking all the time, and it would be nice if someone cleaned her house for her — but she doesn’t miss a lot of it.
Some of those lessons will affect her vote in November. She’s a registered Republican, but she said she’d never vote for Donald Trump. The financial challenges of the past several years and Trump’s approach to the COVID-19 pandemic which, to her, felt like it prioritized business over saving lives, have informed that position.
Ganuzza was undergoing cancer treatment on Election Day in 2016 and remembers feeling more afraid of what Trump could do as president than the treatment she was about to undergo, she said. And over the past four years, when everything she thought was valuable went away, she realized she didn’t actually value those things very much.
“Things used to matter a lot more to me,” she said. “And now it’s: People matter. Things don’t.”
The 19th
The 19th
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Today’s story comes from our partner The 19th. The 19th is an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting at the intersection of gender, politics and policy. Visit them online at 19thnews.org or on Instagram @19thnews.
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