The United States of America is celebrating its 250th birthday on July 4th, and if you know anything about Americans, it’s that we like to grill in the summer.
Veteran grillmasters know to stand upwind to avoid the charcoal smoke that’s cooking the meat, but those who don’t know quickly learn as the eye-watering becomes unbearable.
But this year, grocery prices for at least a couple of cookout necessities are significantly higher than they were when America was celebrating its 240th birthday.
“When Americans bring up food prices, they are usually talking about what they see on the checkout screen. But that number does not reveal much by itself,” a study by Oxylabs documenting rising prices said. “It is influenced by general inflation, which has climbed around 40% this decade.”
Inflation is going to make July 4th shopping more costly
If you’ve noticed that ground beef prices at the grocery store are out of control, you aren’t alone. Beef prices are at record highs due to a 75-year low in cattle inventory.
It got so bad that the U.S. Department of Justice launched an antitrust probe into the “big four” meat packers that control 85% of the country’s beef processing capacity, and is now reportedly pursuing criminal charges for alleged price-fixing and collusion.
All-fresh retail beef prices peaked at an average of $9.64 per pound. Ground beef is hovering around $6.75 per pound after peaking at $6.90, and the USDA projects that beef prices will continue to climb throughout the year.
So, Oxylabs adjusted all prices to 2026 using the Consumer Price Index for an “apples-to-apples comparison across 10 years.” And what they found was that, outside of the cost of ground beef, the cost of grilling this year is basically the same
If you imagine the average person eats one burger, one dog and one soft drink at a cookout, one cookout serving costs the equivalent of about $7.05 in January 2016. In April 2026, it costs $7.35.
When measured as a share of a weekly paycheck, the lack of increase is even more glaring. A cookout serving accounted for 0.6% of median weekly earnings. 10 years later, it takes up the same share, 0.6%.
A cookout for a typical U.S. household of four people takes about 2.4% of one week’s pay, or under an hour of work at the median wage.
Like many things in life, food prices were much more affordable before Covid.
From 2016 through 2020, affordability improved every year, but then in 2022, food prices took the largest single-year jump in cookout costs of the entire decade, erasing most of the gains from the previous five years.
Without beef, cookouts would cost less
The idea of going without burgers for your July 4th cookout sounds downright un-American, but it would greatly reduce the cost of your Independence Day feast.
Ground beef prices have risen 32% year over year in real terms since 2016, the largest single increase of any item Oxlabs tracked.
Soft drinks have also seen a large increase, climbing 30%, and sauces are 10% more expensive now than they were a decade ago.
But some of the fixins are cheaper, like buns, which are down 12%, cheese, down 17%, and tomatoes, down 18%.
The overall cost to make a burger with all the fixins is 11% higher overall.
“Beef grabs the headlines, but it’s not the whole story. The diversification of ingredients in a classic burger has acted as a natural hedge – when beef prices spiked, the stability of dairy and produce acted as a stabilizer. You only see that with long-term, basket-level tracking,” said Marija Gecaite, Oxylabs chief commercial officer.
If you do decide to leave burgers off the menu this year, you could opt to buy some extra hot dogs whose price, including the sausage, bun, and ketchup, has stayed the same since 2016 at $2.06.
This is only possible because while hot dog sausage prices have risen 33% in real terms since 2016, the price of buns and ketchup has fallen.
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