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Daily Bread for 8.5.25: Prices (Claim & Reality)

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of 81. Sunrise is 5:50 and sunset is 8:10, for 14 hours, 19 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 85.3 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Alcohol & Licensing Committee meets at 5 PM, and the Whitewater Common Council meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1735, New York Weekly Journal writer John Peter Zenger is acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, on the basis that what he had published was true.


The claim in the fall of 2024:

The reality in the summer of 2025:

More than half of Americans (53%) see grocery prices as a major source of stress and another 33% see it as a minor source of stress, according to a new poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. 

More people were concerned about grocery prices than any other financial concern brought up in the poll, but more than half of respondents also said they were at least somewhat stressed about their salaries, the cost of housing, the amount of money they have saved, their credit card debt and the cost of health care. 

The Consumer Price Index shows the price of food has risen 3% in the last 12 months—groceries have risen 2.4% while dining out is 3.8% costlier than it was 12 months ago.

From June 2024 to June 2025, groceries got more expensive in every category tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics: meats, poultry, fish and eggs rose in price by 5.6% (egg prices alone rose 27.3%); nonalcoholic beverages are 4.4% more expensive; fruits and vegetables rose in price by 0.7%; and both cereals and bakery products and the index for dairy products rose 0.9%.

At 3%, the cost of food is rising faster than the overall inflation rate as measured by the Consumer Price Index, at 2.7%. 

After groceries, the price of housing had the highest number of people reporting it as a major stressor in Monday’s poll (47%), followed by the amount of money saved (43%), salary (43%) and the cost of health care (42%).

See Mary Whitfill Roeloffs, Almost 90% Of Americans Are Worried About The Cost Of Groceries, Forbes, August 4, 2025.


Fireworks display goes wrong in Japan as boats catch fire:

Two boats launching fireworks caught fire in Japan on Monday during a summer festival in Yokohama, located south of Tokyo. Roughly 20 minutes in the event, the music stopped and the officials announced the event was cancelled “due to safety concerns.”

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