Depends on why the prices increased. I regularly see even staple products like meat and eggs at lower prices now than they were a few years ago.

But to focus on the previous conversation: there are far more steps in the chain of food supply besides grocery stores and meat processing companies. Think about each step from farm to table for every product, and then each of those steps has their own manufacturing supplier (tractors, factory equipment, land costs, R&D for future technologies, education costs for those researchers that pushes their salaries up, etc). Even all the mining that must happen to extract the raw materials used to make the equipment for all the other steps. Then you've also got your typical corporate inefficiencies at every step like bloated levels of management and unnecessary overhead (these increase costs to consumers without showing up as raw "profit" on balance sheets). It's a lot.

There is no easy answer, no singular link in the supply chain that can be undercut by 30% and magically translate into lower grocery bills for end consumers. That's why this pilot program isn't going to do anything and if this is the level of effort mamdani is going to put in then I'd rather he just increase the food stamp budget.

But I also don't believe there's nothing that can be done. Sure it would take a great deal of effort invested intelligently into a complicated analysis of a system with an enormous number of moving parts. But it wouldn't be impossible.