Every time I fill up the car and then head into the grocery store, I play a little game called “which receipt hurts more?” So I finally settled it with data. I charted US gas prices against grocery prices from 2000 to 2026, using the Consumer Price Index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Gas won the race: +204% vs +93%
Quick guess before you scroll: if groceries roughly doubled since 2000, how much do you think gas went up? Got your number?
Gas is up 204% since January 2000, and groceries (what BLS calls “food at home”) are up 93%. Both figures compare the 2026 average so far (January to September) with January 2000, and they’re the exact numbers at the finish line of my chart. So yes, gas beat groceries: its rise was about 2.2 times as big as the cart’s.
Plot twist: groceries pulled ahead in 2002
Gas led in 2000 and 2001, but in 2002 it was only about 4% above its January 2000 level, while groceries were up about 6%. For one brief moment the cart was winning! Then gas floored it.
Gas is a roller coaster
Gas swung hard, again and again:
- 2008: gas averaged +148%, then fell back to +80% in 2009.
- 2014 to 2015: from +160% down to about +90%, a drop of more than a quarter in one year.
- 2020: down to +73%, from +107% the year before.
- 2022: the high point of the chart at +211%. It cooled to +149% by 2025, then jumped back to +204% in 2026.
Groceries are the slow burn
The green line hardly ever looks dramatic, and that’s exactly the problem. Groceries climbed almost every single year. The only dip in the yearly averages was a tiny one, about 1.5% between 2015 and 2017. The biggest jump came in 2022, when the yearly average rose about 11% in one go. And it never gave that back.
What it means for your wallet
- Gas is volatile. It spikes hard but also falls back, sometimes by a quarter or more in a year.
- Groceries rise steadily and stay up. Lower prices at the pump can show up within a year. Lower prices at the checkout almost never do.
- Groceries mostly kept pace with everything else. On the same basis, overall consumer prices are up about 97%, so groceries (+93%) roughly tracked general inflation. Gas is the real outlier.
My takeaway: you can’t control the pump, but you can control your cart. That’s why I lean on simple home cooking and a handful of easy recipes that make every bag of groceries count.
Your turn
Which hurts your wallet more: filling the tank or filling the cart? And if you could freeze one price at its 2000 level forever, would it be gas or groceries? Tell me in the comments!
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted: Gasoline (all types) (CUUR0000SETB01), Food at home (CUUR0000SAF11) and All items (CUUR0000SA0), January 2000 through September 2026. The chart shows yearly averages as percent change from January 2000; 2026 is the January–September average.
Note: BLS has no October 2025 reading for groceries or overall prices (“data unavailable due to the 2025 lapse in appropriations,” i.e., the government shutdown), so that month is left blank rather than estimated.
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