The cost of going out to restaurants in the United States continues to rise. The Department of Labor says that restaurant prices have gone up by almost 9% since last year.
In March, the cost of eating out in the US was higher than the cost of groceries for the first time since the middle of 2021, according to figures released by the Labor Department on Wednesday.
According to the findings, restaurant prices have gone up 8.8% in the last year. This is the third month in a row that they have gone up, and they have gone up 0.6% since February. The price of groceries, or “food at home,” has gone up 8.4% year-over-year, but it has gone down 0.3% since February.
Analysts say that the data could be a bad sign for the American restaurant business, which is already struggling because people are eating out less to save money during the cost-of-living problem. CNBC says that many restaurants have been raising their prices lately to keep their profit margins from going down. This makes people go out to eat less or spend less when they do go out to eat.
But Bruce Grindy, the top economist for the National Restaurant Association, said that the statistics could have been messed up by the fact that school food prices went up after the free lunch programs set up during the Covid-19 pandemic ended.
“As a result, this price index has gone up sharply in recent months, which is putting upward pressure on the overall food-away-from-home index,” he said in a blog post on Wednesday, as reported by CNBC. He said that he thought this index would keep making it hard to understand the total readings for food away from home until the fourth quarter of the year.
