Covid-19 cases are rising again, but redesigned vaccines are on the horizon.
You counted the days until your vaccine appointment, posted a selfie with a bandage on your arm, and diligently came back weeks later for the follow-up shot, already making plans to enjoy hot vax summer. But new Covid-19 variants stepped out of the shadows, and health officials recommended that everyone get a booster dose. You got yours and thought you were done. Then omicron spawned its own subvariants that started infecting people even if they already had Covid-19 and their boosters.
So, do you need another Covid-19 shot?
For many people, right now, the unsatisfactory answer is “it depends.”
Last week, the US government announced it was buying 66 million doses of Moderna’s variant-specific Covid-19 vaccine booster, adding to the 105 million doses of reformulated vaccines purchased from Pfizer earlier. The companies say they will likely be available in October and November.
“We must stay vigilant in our fight against COVID-19 and continue to expand Americans’ access to the best vaccines and treatments,” wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra in a statement. “As we look to the fall and winter, we’re doing just that.”
But federal officials also said that they weren’t yet changing the eligibility guidelines for a fourth dose. Currently, they’re recommended only for people over the age of 50 and people who are immunocompromised. Everyone else will likely have to wait until the fall to get the go-ahead from regulators.
Some experts, though, think it might be worth getting a second booster now if you face a high risk of Covid-19 exposure or if your previous dose was ages ago. The rise of BA.5 has spooked many of them, despite evidence the virus causes less severe disease now than at any other point during the pandemic. And despite the surge in cases, death trends have hardly moved, indicating that the previous crop of vaccines is still doing its main job of preventing severe illness for most people.
Adding to the confusion is that public health measures like face mask mandates and social distancing requirements are disappearing, increasing the chances of exposure. So managing the risks and response to Covid-19 is almost entirely up to you, the individual, and that can be tricky when there are so many moving parts.
To add a little clarity, here are answers to some key questions about Covid-19 vaccine boosters.
Who needs to get boosted and when? Should I get the original now or wait for the remix?
The current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines recommend a first booster shot for everyone 5 years old and up to be administered at least five months out from the initial doses of mRNA Covid-19 vaccines — the vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. People who received the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine should get an mRNA booster at least two months out from the initial dose.
As for second boosters, if you’re over 50 or immunocompromised and the timing from your first doses works out, you should get the shot right away, says Andrew Pekosz, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins University. “A booster now is going to help you avoid the hospital, and it’s something you need to do,” he explained.
If you’re not in a high-risk group — under 50 and pretty healthy — there’s no need to rush, according to Pekosz. Severe disease rates in people without other preexisting health conditions are extremely low. “I don’t think, right now, there’s a good reason to have relatively healthy individuals get a booster,” said Pekosz.
US health officials were concerned that if someone in this lower-risk category gets boosted now, they may have to wait longer to get a newer vaccine, since the minimum interval between boosters is several months. Getting booster shots too close together may not lead to an effective immune response and could also raise the risk of rare complications like myocarditis.
Because they’re expecting a larger spike in cases later this year, health officials want to allocate more resources to a fall vaccination campaign rather than trying to get younger people boosted now.
However, other researchers said that depending on an individual’s risk and exposure to Covid-19, it might make sense to get topped up right away. “I think there should be flexibility and permissiveness,” Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the president, told the New York Times.
One factor is that the revamped vaccines offer better protection against the newer variants than the original formulations (more on that below), but the improvement may not be worth waiting for.
“To people asking, ‘Should I take the fourth dose now or wait for the new one,’ it’s not so much better that I would wait, because we’re in the middle of a wave. You should take what you can get now,” said Tania Watts, a professor of immunology at the University of Toronto. But while the bivalent vaccine isn’t perfect, it offers enough advantages to make it a preferred choice when it does become available. “I’ll probably take the bivalent vaccine when it’s available, because even if it’s incremental, it’s what we have,” she said.
What makes the booster shots different? How effective are they?
The reformulated booster doses of the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna that the government is preparing to distribute this fall are “bivalent.” That means they contain the tools to target the original version of SARS-CoV-2 and its omicron variant.
Rather than delivering a whole inert virus or a fragment of it as conventional vaccines do, mRNA vaccines give human cells the genetic instructions for making pieces of the virus. In the case of the Covid-19 vaccines, they serve as an assembly manual for the spike protein of the virus. The bivalent vaccines contain mRNA instructions for making the spike protein of the original version of SARS-CoV-2 and the spike protein common to the BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants.
After you get a vaccine, your immune system revs up and starts making antibodies, which are proteins that bind to the virus and can stop it from causing an infection. If you have high levels of antibodies that can neutralize a virus, this usually means you’re well protected against infection. Antibody production, however, tapers off over time, so a vaccinated individual may be vulnerable to an infection after a few months. A booster shot ramps antibody production back up.
But antibodies attach best to very particular sites on the virus. If those sites mutate, as they have with the recent SARS-CoV-2 variants, antibodies become less effective at blocking infection. The bivalent vaccines restore some of this protection.
In clinical trials, the bivalent vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech did increase the level of neutralizing antibodies to omicron subvariants by less than two-fold compared to the original versions of their boosters. But the first round of booster shots raised antibody levels 25-fold or more, a result that’s led some researchers to say the bivalent shots aren’t a big enough improvement over the existing formula. That’s part of why there is some debate over getting boosters now to protect against the rising BA.5 wave versus waiting for a more targeted shot later this year. (Researchers have also noted that the results arose from trials of several hundred individuals, whereas the initial vaccines were tested in tens of thousands of people.)
One issue with deploying bivalent Covid-19 vaccines in the fall is that by the time they’re widely available, another variant or subvariant will likely be in circulation. That could erode their advantage over the original shots.
Another is that antibodies are not the whole story. They do decline and can leave an opening for infection, but other parts of the immune system can readily switch back on and stop an infection from causing too much damage. So far, researchers have found that the immune system’s memory cells — B cells and T cells — are still holding strong against the new variants in most people, even though they were trained with an earlier version of the virus.
And from a public health standpoint, the biggest concern isn’t preventing infection but preventing severe disease, where the virus causes enough damage to send people to the hospital or kill them. The initial Covid-19 vaccines still do the job of preventing severe disease well. A second round of boosters could blunt another surge of infections, but it’s not clear if that alone would be worth the money and effort, especially when tactics like face masks and social distancing also prevent infection. The risks from disease are also declining. There are now multiple effective treatments for Covid-19, too, so getting sick isn’t as dangerous as it used to be.
“We’ve spent $3 billion on these bivalent vaccines. Is that really how you’re going to best spend your money, given how uncomfortably scant those data were?” said Paul Offit, director of vaccine education at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “There are, I think, other strategies out there.”
What if I just had Covid-19?
With the recent surge of the BA.5 omicron subvariant, lots of people who were previously infected or vaccinated are getting infected again, especially since many received their first booster more than six months ago. But surviving an infection can also boost protection against Covid-19 for a period of time.
“A Covid infection in a vaccinated person — essentially that functions as a booster,” Pekosz said. “So you probably don’t need to get a booster for anywhere from three to six months after your Covid infection.”
Some researchers showed that “hybrid immunity” from vaccination and infection in an individual could boost the overall immune system response and prevent future infections. But omicron subvariants like BA.5 have managed to evade even this heightened protection in some people.
This isn’t just due to changes in the virus and waning immunity. People are also letting their guards down. Schools, offices, stores, and public venues are reopening to full capacity while fewer people are masking and distancing, so the likelihood of being exposed to the virus has gone up.
In general, though, the timing of your last infection or booster is a better gauge of when you need another shot than the specific formulation of the next booster, according to Pekosz.
“I say that carefully because that’s kind of against some of the CDC guidelines,” he said. “But I think the scientific community is appreciating the fact that infection of vaccinated persons functions as a booster.”
That said, there are no firm rules about how soon to get boosted after recovering from Covid-19. If you haven’t had a booster dose, some health experts recommend getting it as soon as you are no longer contagious.
Will we need a new one every year?
It’s hard to say. Again, the original vaccines still do a good job of preventing deaths from Covid-19, and recent studies show that the immune system’s long-term memory still holds up well against the newer variants.
But the virus is also changing. If a new variant arises that leads to a spike in severe disease or death, then it may be necessary. Given the current pace of mutations and patterns of immunity, that could become an annual development. “The way we are with vaccines now, I see us probably needing these bivalent or multivalent vaccines every year for the coronavirus season,” said Watts.
At the same time, scientists are working on vaccines that could cover the spectrum of current and future coronavirus variants and investigating techniques that build up durable and longer-lasting immunity. It’s possible that a future universal Covid-19 vaccine could end up being the last one needed for most people (more on that below).
Is the testing and approval process any different?
With billions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines already administered around the world, there is a massive trove of information available about the safety and efficacy of the shots. So health regulators are using a more streamlined approval process for boosters that could get them into arms sooner. The Food and Drug Administration said it will not require new clinical trials for boosters targeting the most recent SARS-CoV-2 variants. This approach is similar to how influenza vaccines are reformulated year to year.
What happens if too few people get boosted?
So far, 34.5 percent of people who are eligible for boosters in the US have gotten them, so the uptake has been low. If that trend continues with the reformulated shots, individuals will likely be protected, but the virus will continue spreading. That will give it more opportunities to mutate in dangerous ways.
However, vaccines are not just a tool to protect individuals, but a way to protect the population at large since they lower rates of transmission and relieve burdens on the health system. This extends beyond the US. As the pandemic has demonstrated over and over, problems in other countries don’t stay in other countries.
“We have to think of Covid-19 as a global disease [and] really have to make an even stronger effort here in the US to get vaccines out into the world,” said Pekosz.
Otherwise, we risk repeating the same patterns of new variants causing renewed surges in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
Should I hold out for a universal vaccine?
Universal Covid-19 vaccines are an exciting prospect, but they’re likely years away. These vaccines coach the immune system to target parts of the virus that rarely mutate or they serve up a sampler platter of potential viral mutations, allowing the immune system to practice responding to a spectrum of threats.
“It represents areas that have to be high priorities for research, but are probably not going to be the immediate solutions to our current SARS-CoV-2 problems,” Pekosz said.
But what if we sprayed a firehose of money at universal vaccines the way we did with the first Covid-19 vaccines?
“What Operation Warp Speed taught me was that you could do this,” said Offit, referring to the US government’s $11 billion Covid-19 vaccine research initiative that funded dozens of vaccine approaches and guaranteed purchases of doses even if they didn’t work.
Offit argued that a universal vaccine should be a higher priority than simply remixing Covid-19 vaccines as boosters. “I think that’s money much better spent than on a questionable bivalent strategy,” he said. Even so, the research is still in early phases and plenty of laboratory and clinical testing lies ahead.
Does getting a booster come at the expense of someone in a low-income country?
Given what we said earlier about the need to vaccinate the world and the ongoing vaccine inequities leaving many of the most vulnerable unprotected against Covid-19, it’s reasonable to ask whether there’s an opportunity cost to getting a fourth shot when nearly one-third of humanity has yet to receive their first.
But experts say that your booster shot isn’t the main problem. Closing international vaccination gaps requires strategy and action from the government, not individuals.
“Once a vaccine gets into your local pharmacy, it’s really not going to be pulled back and sent someplace else,” Pekosz said. “The US government needs to sort of realistically assess what the means are for vaccines here and send surplus vaccines directly to other countries as opposed to stockpiling them here in the US.”
What’s stopping me from getting more shots if I want them?
Nothing, really. With the widespread availability of Covid-19 vaccines, you can get a shot free at most pharmacies and clinics, and there isn’t a robust way to check how many doses you’ve had. There have been tales of people around the world getting vaccinated a dozen times or more.
But for the reasons outlined above, it’s a bad idea. Getting Covid-19 shots too close together can interfere with how your immune system recognizes new variants, and it can raise the risks of some rare side effects.
Whether or not you should get a shot now depends on your specific risk level: how much you’re exposed and how vulnerable you are if you get sick. If you’re under 50 but pregnant, diabetic, obese, asthmatic, or have another risk factor for severe Covid-19, talk to a health professional about the best timing for you.
States are remembering that they can own housing, too.
What if one of the answers to America’s housing crisis is something that’s been staring us in the face?
Public housing — but not exactly the kind most people think of.
Even before the pandemic, the nation had too few homes available to buy or rent. Housing prices were eating up bigger chunks of people’s budgets every year — and that was all before inflation started wreaking havoc on American bank accounts. Now, with the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates to try to rein in inflation, one unfortunate but entirely predictable consequence is a reduction in home construction. With mortgage rates going up, fewer people are looking to buy, which means fewer private developers are launching projects compared to a year ago, unwilling to risk not landing a buyer. Housing experts warn that the longer this all drags on, the harder it will be to get new projects started later, worsening an already serious housing shortage.
To prevent this grim spiral, a small but growing number of analysts and lawmakers are turning their sights to an idea that has fallen mostly out of favor over the last 50 years: what if the government steps in to develop its own housing? Specifically, state and local governments.
In June the Rhode Island legislature approved $10 million in its state budget for a new pilot program to build mixed-income public housing. It’s one of several state and local governments starting to get into a game that’s historically been the federal government’s purview.
K. Joseph Shekarchi, a Democrat who serves as the state’s powerful House speaker, pushed to include this funding as one way to tackle Rhode Island’s affordable housing crisis. “I think housing authorities in Rhode Island are one of the best-kept secrets. They produce clean, affordable, low-income housing that are really well-maintained and high quality,” he told Vox. “So with this $10 million, we want to see if there’s an appetite for incentivizing housing authorities to increase their housing stock.”
Governments have successfully addressed past housing shortages through publicly developed housing in places like Vienna, Finland, and Singapore, but citing these examples often leads to glazed eyes and weary skepticism that such models could ever work in the US, with our more meager welfare systems and our strong cultural attitudes toward private homeownership. America’s 958,000 units of federal public housing have also long suffered from reputation problems both real and exaggerated, with many seen as ugly, dirty, or unsafe. Few understand that many of the woes of American-style public housing have had to do with rules Congress passed nearly 100 years ago that predictably crippled its success and popularity, rules like restricting the housing to only the very poor.
“There’s just real skepticism that governments can do things well, and there’s the stigma of American public housing driven by racist and classist policy choices that have undermined public housing here in ways that European and Asian public housing programs have not,” said Alex Lee, a California state representative, who introduced a bill this year to create new publicly owned mixed-income housing.
Lee prefers the term “social housing” — to help differentiate his vision from the segregated, income-restricted, and underfunded public housing that has defined the American model. “But just because there were mistakes made doesn’t mean we’re doomed to repeat them,” he added.
Lee’s legislation commanded wide support from powerful constituencies in California, and passed through both his chamber and the state Senate’s housing committee. Though his bill is now stalled out, experts say it went farther than anyone expected on its first try, and Lee has pledged to keep pushing next year.
In Colorado, lawmakers just passed a bill creating a new state office to develop 3,500 new housing units targeted to middle-class families. And in Hawaii, lawmakers recently passed several bills that make it easier for the state to build mixed-income condos with 99-year leases, similar to how public housing works in Singapore.
But where this model may already most clearly demonstrate the government’s power to increase housing supply is in Montgomery County, Maryland — a suburb just outside Washington, DC. The local public housing authority there is on track to build nearly 9,000 new publicly owned mixed-income apartments over the coming years, by leveraging relatively small amounts of public money to create a revolving fund that can finance short-term construction costs. One of their initial projects — 268 new apartment units located near a planned bus rapid transit line — is set to be finished this year.
“What I like about what we’re doing is all we have effectively done is commandeered the private American real estate model,” said Zachary Marks, the chief real estate officer for Montgomery County’s housing authority. “We’re replacing the investor dudes from Wall Street, the big money from Dallas.”
State and local governments don’t have the best track record at quickly spinning up new affordable housing, and most public housing authorities lack staff like Marks, experienced in this kind of real estate acquisition. But the public sector can start with acknowledging they have the tools and resources that make it easier to build even in weak economic periods, plus no voracious investor to satisfy at the end of a project. Governments could even step in now to buy half-finished housing from companies that suddenly find themselves unable to make their financing math work.
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Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission
While Montgomery County is a liberal area in a blue state, Marks notes there’s nothing about what they’re doing [with the Housing Production Fund] that heavily relies on government subsidies, which is typical of traditional affordable housing projects. “This kind of project is better for the taxpayer, it avoids a concentration of poverty, and it’s very capitalist in my view,” he said. “A lot of this is just convincing governments that you don’t even know how powerful you actually are.”
States can become public developers in different ways
When Meghan Kallman was first elected to the Rhode Island state Senate in 2020, she knew she wanted to focus on housing. The pandemic had intensified housing insecurity in her district, and Rhode Island ranked near the bottom nationally for building new units. And while an early 1990s law already required every Rhode Island city and town to have at least 10 percent of its housing be affordable to low and moderate-income households, only six out of 39 municipalities actually met that target in 2020.
Kallman said this all showed more aggressive state action was needed. With the backing of Reclaim RI, an activist group formed by leaders of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, Kallman proposed the Create Homes Act, legislation to launch a new state agency that could build, own, and operate housing.
The idea, Kallman explained, is to have an agency that could develop plans not only for increasing housing supply but also for maintaining and repairing existing housing stock. She introduced it near the end of this year’s session, and though it didn’t pass, it picked up significant support, including Rhode Island’s Senate President Dominick Ruggerio. Kallman thinks they’re well positioned to get it over the finish line in 2023.
“What would it look like to have a system where rental units are state-administered, and it falls into the category of a public good that people can avail themselves of?” she asked. “I think that’s a really interesting proposal and something I’m really excited to support and see how it works out.”
Andrew Friedson, a Montgomery County councilmember who has been leading efforts in Maryland to address his region’s housing shortage, told Vox he’s been supporting the public development idea because “there is now much broader recognition and understanding” that governments have to be more aggressive. “The status quo and even marginal improvements are not going to come anywhere close to meeting the need,” he said.
Indeed, states typically have not attempted any of this. While states since the 1980s have taken a leading role in funding and administering affordable rental housing, developing and owning mixed-income housing has not been something governments in the US have done, or even seen as their responsibility.
Mark Shelburne, a national housing policy consultant, said the public developer idea holds promise. “It’s pretty rare that someone actually has a truly new idea in this space,” he said. “Pretty much every idea out there has already been said before — and who knows, maybe at some point in history someone had this same concept and we’ve all just forgotten — but I will say this does seem like a new idea today.” Shelburne added that the concept “absolutely can be viable” if the authorizing legislation is set up properly and flexibly.
Paul Williams, the founder and director of the Center for Public Enterprise, a recently launched think tank, has been leading efforts to promote the idea of state and local public housing developers.
It’s not an immediate fix — “getting out of this mess will take no less than 20 years,” he wrote in an essay last August on solving the housing crisis — but it’s one of the only viable solutions he sees.
“Congress is not going to fund new public housing, we can’t even get them to fund the capital backlog,” Williams told Vox, referring to the billions of dollars needed for outstanding repairs and maintenance of existing federal housing units. “So getting local and state governments to create public enterprises to do public development is what I see as the way to move this forward.”
States are rediscovering their self-interest
Why did states retreat from developing their own affordable housing, anyway? Part of the reason is that the federal government stepped up to the plate, with the Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949, and establishing the US Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1965. States and local governments were happy to let HUD take over, but when federal public housing started to lose support in Congress in the 1970s, and the Reagan and Clinton administrations slashed HUD’s budget in the ’80s and ’90s, there was no real state and local infrastructure around to fill the void.
Shekarchi, the Rhode Island House speaker, noted that housing has always been a difficult and complicated issue, and on the local level, many communities balk at any hint of affordable housing construction and associated tax increases. “Many people don’t want it because they think affordable housing means more traffic or diminishing of home values or crime or drugs or low-income people,” he said. “And I think state government is reflective of those views. We have two-year election cycles and legislators are reflective of the public.”
But despite these NIMBY attitudes, some local policymakers are beginning to recognize their own self-interest in stepping up on housing development, capitalizing on tools and public ownership that can create value and be reinvested into the community.
“Both because we don’t have to meet the private sector return requirements, and because it’s much easier to set policy on things that you own, all of that [revenue] just gets poured back into overall housing production and operation,” said Marks, of Montgomery County. “A lot of the time I’m talking to people about the short-term benefits [of our development model], but frankly the biggest benefit is that value that we’re creating very slowly over 20 years, so that the people sitting in my chair in two or three decades will have a ton of resources that can be realizable by them then, to continue the mission.”
Stanley Chang, a state senator in Hawaii who has been leading efforts in his state to promote social housing, says he spent a lot of time visiting places like Vienna and Singapore to understand regions that actually solved their housing shortages. “I’m not arguing we should copy-and-paste but I do think we should learn the lessons from these places,” Chang said.
Kallman, the Rhode Island state senator, says she doesn’t view her proposed public developer bill as a revenue generator for the state, though she acknowledges it could indeed turn out to be one. “For me this is primarily about the state stepping up,” she said. “To solve a housing problem that is affecting huge numbers of people.”
From chicken tenders to tampons, the price hikes that are irking people most.
Peter Lewis recognizes that eggs aren’t the biggest expenditure in the world. But amid today’s levels of inflation, the price increase on the consumer staple really gets to him. “I tend to buy the same things every week, and for some reason, with eggs, I just eat a lot of them, and I notice the prices on them,” he says. The 18 extra-large eggs he buys were $3.18 in early 2021; now, they’re $5.12. Over the weekend, Lewis spent nearly $100 at his local Walmart on food for him and his wife, an amount he doesn’t believe he’s ever hit before. “It’s not like we’re buying a whole shopping cart.”
Inflation is ugly. For consumers, it is painful in ways big and small. People’s wages aren’t keeping up with rising prices, meaning some are having to make important cutbacks to stay afloat. Beyond the economic hardship imposed by inflation, there’s also a real psychological toll. People are paying more attention to prices than they have in the past, and they’re noticing increases on the items most familiar to them — increases that may not be the biggest, but that are nevertheless irksome.
“Price increases hurt because we don’t evaluate the price of eggs in absolute terms, we evaluate it with regard to what we used to pay for them,” says Deborah Small, a professor of behavioral marketing at Yale School of Management. “A price increase is like a loss, and we feel pain when we experience that loss.”
With the way inflation is going lately, that feeling of loss abounds.
At today’s current inflation levels, practically everybody has taken a look at the price of something and thought, “Wait a minute, what?” For some people, it’s on big-ticket items such as homes and cars. For others, it’s on small-ticket stuff that nevertheless leaves them taken aback, wondering how in the world a package of paper towels is $5 more than it was just months ago, or whether that bag of chips used to be a little bigger for the same price. Often, we notice changes more when it’s stuff we buy habitually. And, of course, all those little price increases add up.
Lewis, 71, and his wife are okay — they’re retired now, had good corporate jobs their whole lives, saved a lot, and rode out a few bull markets. But he can’t help but worry about others. “I look at Walmart, I see families shopping there, and I know an extra $50 a week is a killer for those people,” he says.
Inflation is a common topic now, basically all the time and everywhere. At the start of August, my Vox colleagues and I talked about where inflation had shown up in people’s lives and what had just kind of broken them. Because this is the year 2022 and I work in online media, I asked that question on Twitter. There was a variety of responses, but overwhelmingly, the most common place people hit a breaking point on inflation was at the grocery store.
Hila Paldi, who owns a Pilates studio in New York, told me she hit her wall on bacon, a key ingredient for her son’s beloved homemade bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches. The package she gets used to be $8.99 at her local supermarket, and when she went to buy it recently, it was $12.99. “I went to the manager, and I said, ‘Is this right, or is this a mistake?’ And they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s the price now,’” she says. So she didn’t buy it. “Honestly, this is something we can totally live without.”
Drew Ober, an engineer in Indianapolis, told me the thing getting to him the most was frozen chicken tenders. He likes to have them on hand at home because they’re an easy work-from-home lunch or lazy dinner. “I do hesitate almost every time now,” he says. He pulled up some old grocery receipts to make sure he was right, telling me he’d bought a 48-ounce bag of chicken tenders in April 2021 for $8.79. Now, it’s listed as $11.99. Much of the time he still gets them, though he also feels less guilty about going to restaurants to get them instead. “It doesn’t feel like I’m saving as much anymore buying groceries.”
It’s not just prices going up at the store that is bothering consumers — it’s also sizes going down, which is what happened to Tony Sarthou, a father of two hungry teens in New Jersey. “Doritos and Oreos, for better or for worse, are very key staples in our kitchen,” he says. But lately, he’s noticed the packaging is getting smaller — a phenomenon referred to as shrinkflation, where companies just give you less for the same amount of money. On multiple occasions, Sarthou says he and his wife have walked down the grocery store aisle, looked at the prices and sizes of the packages, and just walked away. “The sizes are getting smaller, the price is either the same or more often than not, higher.” They’re starting to swap out for generic or private-label brands.
Many people wonder whether the price hikes — or the package shrinkage — was really necessary. Wasn’t there some sort of reward for being loyal to a local grocery store? Sure, there have been supply issues on chicken tenders because of worker shortages and the bird flu, but was that really it? How much were the makers of Oreos — owned by American food conglomerate Mondelez — really saving by giving you slightly fewer cookies?
“I really don’t see how this is trickling down to us, I don’t see where it makes sense,” says Dorothy, a teacher in New York and mother of two, who asked for her last name to be withheld to protect her privacy. Her family has special dietary needs — she has severe food allergies, her husband is a vegetarian — that force them to make some “tough decisions.” On organic strawberries for $7.99, the answer is “Are you kidding me?” A half-gallon of ice cream for $4.79 is a “Hell no,” and pasta for $2.49 a box “just isn’t going to happen.” She writes a list before going to the store, and if the item isn’t on the list, it doesn’t get bought. “We don’t go on vacation, home improvements have been halted,” she says of how her family is adjusting. “It seems outrageous.”
As Julia Carpenter noted in the Wall Street Journal, people understand price tags by way of the items that make up their daily budgets. They use a handful of mental benchmarks to gauge their inflation expectations. David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, told the WSJ people take these benchmarks and then “they totally extrapolate that to the economy at large.”
Beyond everyday items, having inflation on the brain is likely making people think more about prices than they normally would, explains Utpal Dholakia, a professor of marketing at Rice University’s business school. “Consumers’ knowledge of prices is generally really bad. By and large, in normal conditions, most of us don’t know prices of most of the regular things that we buy,” he says. “What inflation has done is it has made people pay more attention as a general rule.”
And, in turn, people feel more annoyed. Especially as the total amount of everything moves up.
Dholakia advises companies about pricing strategy and notes that just because consumers express anger about prices doesn’t mean they always change their behavior. There’s a “huge gap” between what people say and what they do. “They’ll complain,” he says, “but they’ll still pay the higher price.”
That was the case for Andrea from Missouri, who also requested anonymity. Earlier this year, she paid nearly $25 for a single box of o.b. tampons on Amazon (they generally cost under $10). Amid the tampon shortage, she couldn’t find them at Target or Walmart, and she didn’t want to switch brands. She says she thought, “Well, Amazon is technically a black market, maybe you can find them there.” Andrea recognized she was being taken advantage of by the seller and that the price was “ridiculous,” but she clicked to buy anyway. “I know people gotta do what they gotta do to survive, and I’m not super mad at that person,” she says of the Amazon tampon-flipper. “I wanted them desperately.”
Now, she can find her tampons at a more reasonable price, but they’re still more expensive than they used to be, as is everything. Andrea, who works in data analysis, has gotten a raise over the past couple of years, but inflation has made it basically obsolete. “How is it I make the 75th percentile of income in the county and yet I am struggling and can’t save money?” she says. “I’m still broke.” She’s divorced, and being single is expensive. She jokes she could find another husband, but she doesn’t really want to — she likes being alone. “When you’re in your late 40s, if there’s any men out there, you probably don’t want them.”
In recent days, I’ve spoken to many people about the specific places and moments in their lives where they really felt at a breaking point over inflation.
For Vanessa Santos, who had not one but two Covid babies, it was trying to buy new professional outfits to go back to work meetings. “It’s made me start picking up my workout routine post-baby so I can fit into my old clothes,” she says. For Kail Zepeda, a father of four in New Jersey, his moment of shock came when car dealers asked him to pay $11,000 over sticker price for a new car, a phenomenon many buyers on the market are running into. “It’s insane right now,” he says.
I heard from people about asparagus, butter, and donuts, about vacations, apartment rentals, and beer. “$19 for a 12-pack of Coors … come on,” one person commented on Twitter. “Was buying what I thought was a half dozen bagels, realized in the check-out aisle that there were only 5 in the bag and almost lost it,” wrote another.
Ober, the Indianapolis engineer, says gas prices get to him, too, but in a different way. Where he lives, there aren’t really great substitutes to owning a car and driving yourself places. “I feel more helpless to it,” he says. “You can kind of cut back on where you’re going, but I mean, it’s harder to do.”
Existing as a consumer in the current economy just feels really bad. It’s like we’re all being constantly pricked by a thousand tiny needles, all of which sting; every once in a while, one really hits a nerve.
There will be an end at some point, but that will probably hurt, too. American consumers, especially younger ones, aren’t used to inflation, and many aren’t used to having to make sacrifices or be as thoughtful about their purchases. The entire situation is just not ideal.
As for Lewis, this is not his first rodeo on inflation. He remembers what it was like to watch prices creep up in the 1970s, the last time inflation was a major problem in the United States, as a young professional living in Manhattan. “I just assumed it would continue forever,” he says. It didn’t — the end to the country’s inflation issue was eventually brought to a forceful and painful end.
Given those memories, he worries about what’s ahead. “I realized what it takes to stop it, and it’s not a pretty picture,” he says. He remembers his friends losing their jobs as the country fell into a recession, and the neverending paranoia that he could be next. He also remembers that while inflation’s acceleration stopped, most prices didn’t come back down, either. “It just kind of stayed,” Lewis, who now lives in Florida, says. “For most things, if they drop, it will be minor.”
In other words, that breaking point you’ve reached on inflation isn’t going to un-break itself anytime soon.