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Did you have a Fourth of July cookout this year? Are you planning a summer cookout with family and friends?
Ketchup on the 2022 news. According to the 2022 Farm Bureau, the cost of a Fourth of July barbeque or summer cookout is up ⬆17 percent from last year. It’s a fact you must-hear(d). The only thing the Biden economic plan has brought down is the amount of cash in the hard working American peoples wallets. Before heading to the store to get those groceries for that summer cookout you might want to see if you can catch a ride on the hot dog mobile first with the price of gas. Gas prices are becoming even more unaffordable, up a whopping ⬆48.7 percent since last year and up ⬆4.1 percent in the last month. And that’s something we all are having to relish.
Last year, President Biden made news when he boasted how Americans were saving 0.16 cents in the cost of a Fourth of July cookout under his administration compared to the $59.66 they paid for the same meal in the summer of 2020.
Here's the White House's tweet announcing President Biden's accomplishment:
A year later, we were curious to find out what Americans might pay for the same meal in 2022 now that we're living with the worst inflation in the last four decades under the workings of the Biden economic plan. So we took the 2021 Farm Bureau's summer cookout menu and shopped for the items on it as closely as we could online at Walmart.
The following table presents our shopping results from our virtual shopping trip to America's largest grocery-selling retailer on June 11, 2022.
Assuming we've come reasonably close in matching the actual products on the 2021 Farm Bureau's shopping list, we find that the cost the summer cookout menu has risen by $12.46 from 2021 to 2022. That is a ⬆20.9 percent increase. Do you think President Biden will be as excited to claim credit for this years increase as he was in claiming credit for a 0.16 cents decrease last year?
About How We Shopped
The prices we show for 2022 are those we found by shopping online at Walmart on June 11, 2022.
The specific items we added to our cart represent our best guess at the national brand name items the Farm Bureau's grocery shoppers put into their shopping cart when compiling their annual summer cookout costs. When a specific quantity of an item wasn't readily available at Walmart, we substituted the next closest item we could find for it. For example, in the case of the homemade potato salad, we substituted a ready-to-eat potato salad product since we didn't have the Farm Bureau's recipe for making their homemade version, which also meant getting less potato salad. The notes below describe where the quantity of items in our Walmart shopping trip differs from the Farm Bureau's shopping list:
[1] 2 lbs (32 ounces) of ready-to-eat potato salad (vs 2.5 lbs, or 40 ounces, of homemade)
[2] 28 ounces of pork and beans (vs 32 ounces)
[3] 2.8 quarts of ready-to-drink lemonade (vs 2.5 quarts of "freshly squeezed")
Finally, there's no question that a thrifty shopper could easily beat the Farm Bureau's costs while shopping in either 2021 or 2022. If that's you, a good strategy would be to substitute store-brand versions of the products, assuming you're okay with any differences in quality. You could also shop at other grocery stores that may offer lower prices.
The 2022 Farm Bureau report for 2022 summer cookout cost was posted just a couple weeks after our shopping trip on June 28, 2022 and we were curious to see how closely their results match our single online shopping trip results.
Here are The American Farm Bureau Federation 2022 Fourth of July summer cookout cost. They found the cost rose by ⬆17 percent, which is in line with what we found in our previous single-store shopping trip a couple weeks earlier. Here's their infographic showing how the cost changed from 2021:
The biggest difference is they found a cheaper price for cheese, which they found for $1.45 less than what we had, accounting for 63 percent of the total difference from our grocery bill.
(Political Calculations)
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