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Americans are driving less and snacking more. Those are just a couple of the ways our lives have changed during the coronavirus pandemic. Overall, we're spending less and spending differently than we did just a few months ago. And as NPR's Scott Horsley reports, that's affecting consumer prices for everything from pasta to auto insurance.
SCOTT HORSLEY, BYLINE: New inflation numbers out today from the Labor Department offer a window on how consumers are coping in the COVID-19 era. Most of us aren't driving much, so gasoline prices tumbled more than 20%. The price of auto insurance also dropped in April more than any other month on record.
SEAN KEVELIGHAN: With people driving less, that will inevitably mean fewer accidents.
HORSLEY: Sean Kevelighan of the Insurance Information Institute says auto insurers are offering discounts and refunds totaling more than $10 billion this year. He warns, though, with fewer cars on the road, some people are driving faster, and that means the accidents that do happen are often more costly.
KEVELIGHAN: In fact, people are driving more recklessly at this time, and so that means we're having more injuries and greater damage.
HORSLEY: Today's inflation report is filled with mixed messages like that. Overall, consumer prices were way down in April, the sharpest drop since the last big recession a dozen years ago. But prices at the grocery store were way up - the biggest jump since the mid-1970s, when double-digit inflation became a national concern. The price of pasta and rice bubbled up 2.5% last month, hamburger prices ground up 4.8%, and anyone who bought cookies had to lay out 5% more dough. Americans had grown used to spending more than half their food budgets on meals eaten outside the home, but that changed abruptly when the pandemic hit. Restaurants closed their doors, and families were forced to cook for themselves.
DAVID ORTEGA: We saw an immediate, drastic decrease in expenditures away from home and an increase in the expenditures that we made at the grocery store.
HORSLEY: David Ortega understands this. He's a food economist at Michigan State University. He's also the father of a hungry 2-year-old daughter.
ORTEGA: Yep. I have to now, you know, go to the grocery store and make sure we have snacks and Goldfish and crackers and just about, you know, everything that's going up in price.
HORSLEY: Ortega says there's little evidence we're eating more overall, though the price of snacks did jump nearly 4% last month. But where and what we're eating has shifted, and that's created some costly kinks in the supply chain. The same thing famously happened with toilet paper. Household paper prices jumped 4.5% last month. But Kathy Bostjancic of Oxford Economics says if Americans are spending more on necessities like pasta and toilet paper, they're cutting back on everything else.
KATHY BOSTJANCIC: Accordingly, prices are falling. Like, apparel was down on the month again. Airline fares are plummeting, hotel prices down.
HORSLEY: The price of used cars was down last month by nearly half a percent and could fall further if rental car companies decide they've got too many cars and sell some of their surplus. There could be some bargains on the used car lot, Bostjancic says. But with millions of Americans suddenly out of work, it's not clear who will want to buy.
BOSTJANCIC: Therein lies the issue. And that's why you're seeing, you know, across the consumer spectrum, deep discounting.
HORSLEY: If you take out volatile food and gasoline prices, the cost of everything else fell four-tenths of a percent last month. Over the last year, these so-called core prices rose less than 1.5%. If anything, Bostjancic says that means the government can afford to keep borrowing and spending money on emergency relief programs without fear of runaway prices.
BOSTJANCIC: Inflation is the least of our worries right now. We're really looking at disinflation, and in some areas, it's actually deflationary.
HORSLEY: Besides groceries, there are a handful of categories where prices have gone up during the pandemic, some of them especially unwelcome. Those include hospital care and funerals. Scott Horsley, NPR News, Washington.
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