Was at the grocery store today and saw some prices for items related to Thanksgiving meal as being relatively reasonably priced, surprisingly. Some had special pricing that was probably even lower than last year's prices -- if I were pressed to say, based on memory.

But I wasn't there for Thanksgiving dinner shopping and literally everything else I grabbed had to be 50% higher, or more, than what I remember paying a year ago or two years ago. A "family size" box of a brand name cereal ..., $7.50! Oranges, I grabbed a few after reading they were $1.29 per pound -- which I think seems fair. Only at the register did I then learn -- they were actually $1.29 ... EACH!

This store did some renovations and is trying to be more "upscale" or something and their prices jumped up around the same time, so I probably could just drive to the next town over to the Walmart super center for better prices. But then that's $8 in gas round trip (up from maybe $5 pre-pandemic) -- and if I was only grabbing a few things the spend on gas would be a wash versus the savings on the small grocery purchase, and my shopping trip would have taken more than twice as long due to the drive.

But after seeing this post, I'm wondering if they had set their prices on Thanksgiving items to attract shoppers or if it was instead a 4-D chess move so that any Thanksgiving dinner survey taker would see little to no price inflation occurring, which would skew the results of the survey -- resulting in the Fed pivoting sooner than if the Thanksgiving dinner prices at that store weren't at severely reduced levels (relative to those prices seen just a number of days before).