(Bloomberg) — The way inflation has fallen toward the Federal Reserve’s goal with little cost to jobs has many convinced the central bank has won the battle. Victory, however, requires persuading people like Steve DelGiorno that price increases are a thing of the past.
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DelGiorno’s restaurant group — Crema Concepts LLC in Danville, Virginia — has tried to hold menu prices stable over the past two years despite the higher cost of everything from paper cups to eggs. But he doesn’t think he can hold out much longer.
“Turkey, meats, roast beef, ham — it’s crazy. We have eaten as much margin as we can,” DelGiorno says. “What they are reporting is not what we are experiencing,” he says of the government’s inflation statistics.
Fed officials are expected to hold interest rates steady when they meet this week, but dramatic inflation progress in recent months has some predicting officials will start cutting borrowing costs at their subsequent gathering in March.
The inflation metric the Fed targets rose 2.6% in December from a year ago, much improved from the four-decade high of 7.1% seen in 2022. Policymakers’ preferred gauge of underlying inflation has slipped to its slowest annual pace in nearly three years, and widely watched measures of inflation expectations have fallen as a result.
But price shocks can have long echoes in the memories of consumers and businesses.
While inflation has eased, prices have not. Efforts by Americans to catch up to inflation — real or perceived — risk keeping the kind of price stability the US enjoyed for decades out of reach. That’s one reason why Fed officials have indicated they’re in no hurry to cut the benchmark lending rate.
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Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan described price stability as a world in which inflation is so low that neither businesses nor households factor price changes into their daily decisions. But it’s clear the more than 19% surge in consumer prices over the past four years continues to seep into Americans’ views about inflation.
Each week, polling firm Morning Consult asks households how much their incomes would have to rise to purchase the same goods and services they are buying today a year from now. While that measure peaked just above 8% in November 2022, consumers still say they’d need their incomes to rise 5.8% over the coming year to cover those same expenses.
“Consumer attitudes on inflation have improved as inflation has improved,” says Kayla Bruun, a senior economist at Morning Consult. “But overall, there is still a lot of price consciousness.”
“The consumer mindset around prices and inflation is not back to normal,” she says.
Michael Weber, an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, calls it “price nostalgia.” Consumers remember what they used to pay for eggs or an oil change. When they go to purchase that same good or service today, the higher price reignites the perception that inflation is high.
It doesn’t help that many prices continue to climb.
Though there are indications businesses are seeing more consumer pushback from price hikes, a net 25% of small businesses reported recently raising prices in a December survey from the National Federation of Independent Business. A third of owners expect to increase prices further in the next three months.
“People are still out there trying to increase prices at rates higher than pre-Covid levels,” says Richmond Fed President Thomas Barkin, who votes on monetary policy this year. He told reporters earlier this month that he will be watching business and consumer behavior carefully in the first quarter to see how they react to price hikes.
Cost Pressures
Alfonso Wright, the co-founder of Brooklyn Tea, says he would rather not raise prices on his customers. But his costs for items such as some Chinese teas have doubled while agave syrup is up about 30% over two years.
“In February we are going to raise some prices for the first time in five years,” says Wright.
In his view, inflation is far from over. Wright sees few barriers to the cost of rent or equipment repairs moving higher.
Wage growth, however, is one area that firms are beginning to see some reprieve. John Waldmann, founder and chief executive officer of the small business scheduling and payroll software company Homebase, says wage rates held steady in its database of more than 100,000 firms in December after rising 17% in the two years ending in 2023.
That’s just a brick on the road to price stability, but it’s an essential one that Fed officials have been looking for. “Things are starting to settle down,” Waldmann says. “The labor market is returning to normal.”
Judging when to cut rates as the economy slowly returns to stable prices is tricky, says Julia Coronado, founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives LLC. Fed officials may have to cut before that condition is in hand, or risk damaging the economy.
Rates may have to stay higher as officials wait for price nostalgia to fade, she says, “but they don’t need to be where they are.”
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