Inflation 📍

NPR crunched financial disclosures by a dozen of the largest grocery-item makers and sellers, including Walmart, Pepsi, Oreo-maker Mondelez and Procter & Gamble, which makes Pampers and Bounty.

The idea was to track changes not in the sheer dollar amount, which rides the waves of our shopping sprees, but in the percentage of money that stays in corporate coffers after a sale. Economists and accountants use different metrics for this. The gross profit margin is one of them — the portion that companies keep after paying just the direct costs to make or stock their goods.

Companies' financial disclosures cover global operations, meaning lots of variety in costs and prices. But for almost all companies that NPR analyzed, between 2018 and 2023 the margins either declined or grew less than 1%.