Sky-high grocery prices, on top of the cost of gas and other necessities, are driving more working-class households into debt. To cover these expenses, increasing numbers are using their credit cards to pay for food.
Last year over 34% of working-age adults put groceries on their credit card, the Urban Institute reported. Nearly 10% used buy-now, pay-later schemes, where if your payment is past due, or if you miss it, you get hit with late fees and interest rates that could soar over 30%.
In 2025 nearly 20% of working-age adults had to draw on the savings account they had sacrificed to set aside, in order to purchase the week’s groceries. Another 5.2% took out payday loans from their bosses, the terms of which include having the loan repaid out of their next paycheck, along with a fee for this service, like $15 for every $100 borrowed. All too often workers have to get another loan just to pay off the first one.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, household spending on food items for the home averaged $6,224 in 2024 — that’s $520 a month. Of course, if you’ve got kids it’s a lot more. And it’s a far bigger percentage of your bills if you’re stuck with low wages. And whatever portion of this you put on a credit card, it carries an annual interest rate of at least 22% on any unpaid balances, a boon for the big banks.
In fact, if households pay only the required minimum monthly amount, it would take nearly 20 years to wipe out a $3,000 debt and cost another $5,000 in interest. So millions of working-class households end up paying hundreds or thousands of dollars in interest for meals they ate months or years ago!
The capitalists try to blame higher prices on President Donald Trump, the tie-up in the Strait of Hormuz, or whatever. But as prices get jacked up, they’re boosting their profits on top of it. As big-oil barons cry crocodile tears over their troubles, the fact is ExxonMobil and Chevron reported second-quarter earnings of a combined $26.5 billion.
Luxury housing boom — for cars!
For the capitalist class and their upper-middle-class hangers-on, high prices have little bearing on the exotic, luxury items into which they plow their money. This increasing class differentiation is intrinsic to the exploitative workings of their system.
“Ferrari has hit this year’s sales target for its first electric vehicle model,” reported the Financial Times July 29, about 500 of its Luce model so far, each priced from $635,000. The company gears these cars to “reach a new generation of wealthy buyers — particularly in China and technology hubs such as Silicon Valley.” And the company is doing quite well, reporting a net revenue of $2.2 billion for the second quarter.
“These Cars Need Their Own Luxury Condo,” headlined a July 24 New York Times article about a new booming business nationwide building condominiums for cars, part garage and part entertainment club. In fact, “the U.S. luxury and exotic car market is expected to nearly double to up to $215 billion from $110 billion in the next decade,” the paper noted.
Jon Summer, who owns Garaza Design in Scottsdale, Arizona, told the Times his clients spend $400,000 to $1 million to customize their parking spaces. Jack Griffin, a former race car driver, owns a double-size condominium in Carrollton, Texas, which includes a full stocked bar and giant TV screens. He doesn’t live there, but 11 of his 12 Porsches do.
While prices continue to rise — it’s way above the Federal Reserve Board’s target of a 2% annual increase — government officials are now “readjusting” the way they calculate inflation to produce lower price increases. The rejiggering is focused around the Federal Reserve’s preferred core personal consumption expenditures inflation index, which excludes “volatile” food and energy increases.
A similar “cooking the books” to make inflation disappear was also engineered by the Bill Clinton administration in 1997. It substantially “reduced” official price figures by as much as half of what they had been the month before. This didn’t help working people functioning in the real world one bit.