Many believe inflation was a major reason that voters turned out for Donald Trump in November.
The national inflation rate peaked in June 2022 at just above 9%. It has since fallen, but some worry it could accelerate further as a result of the president's tariff policy.
Here at Maine Public, we're launching a project to monitor some of the prices Mainers are seeing. Helping us with this will be Dr. Michael Cauvel, associate professor of economics, and his students at the University of Southern Maine.
Irwin Gratz talked with Cauvel and students Jack Duehring and Madelyn Weston about the process, which Cauvel says will simply track the price of certain groceries in different locations.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
Cauvel: Essentially what it is is we look at prices each month, and we see how those prices are changing. We look at the same goods in the same locations, and we track how the prices change over time.
Gratz: Jack, how are you going about gathering the information that we're going to look for?
Duehring: So basically, where the entire class is involved, we're all using Google Forms. Professor Cauvel is randomly assigning us each a store, we go through, and every single person has the same exact items from every store. You go through, you basically take the price, copy it into the Google Form, submit it, and then he's basically taking all the data, combining it, and then at the end of it, we're gonna look at all of it and compare prices from each and every store.
Weston: We're focusing on four Maine stores, grocery stores across the state of Maine. It's Whole Foods in Portland, Shaw's in Bangor, Walmart in Farmington, and then Hannaford in Caribou. That last one is the one that I'm specializing in myself.
Gratz: In selecting the four supermarkets, they have the geographic diversity, which was important, but also the four of them do kind of tend to reach out to different customer bases.
Weston: I think that we need to address the fact that it's not looking at one class demographic, that each of these appeal to different income ranges. And in order to get an accurate picture, you're right, we have to spread out, and we need to make sure we're getting a more accurate swath of people.
Gratz: So what are some of the factors that could either keep inflation from falling now or actually drive it back up?
Cauvel: There are many factors that contribute to inflation, things that economists call supply shocks can always happen. Those are changes to food prices, changes to energy costs as well as a common factor is the amount of spending throughout the economy by consumers, by businesses, by the government and so on. It's really the interplay of those two things that determine inflation. Grocery prices are a tricky one, because there are aspects of this that are under less control, that are less predictable than a lot of other prices. Eggs is a hot topic at the moment. Well, the avian flu contributes to rising costs of eggs. That's not really something that people can necessarily predict, and it's not something that we can really do much about with policy. We don't have enough chickens to lay eggs, we're not going to have the amount of eggs that we're used to, they're going to become more expensive. Wages also matter, as well as energy cost, something that matters quite a bit. Groceries can also be impacted by weather. Other things that can be tricky to predict: How much rain are we going to get over the summer? How much, how quickly are things going to freeze?
Gratz: Talk a little bit more about why you're interested in economics.
Duehring: I mean, I think economics is definitely a basis in everyone's lives. You know, you're around money, you're around the ideas of economics every single day. So I mean, if you can sit there and understand the basic theories behind economics and why, you know, the business cycle works the way it does, then you're definitely going to be a step ahead of everyone in the game, I would say.
Weston: We're here for credits, but we're also here for the love of the game.
For disclosure, Cauvel is married to Maine Public host and reporter Nicole Ogrysko.
