This is NHPR’s The Big Question. We ask you a question about life in New Hampshire, you submit an answer, and we feature your voices on air and online.
Food affordability remains top of mind for many Granite Staters, especially amid the holiday season.
For November’s Big Question, we asked: How have rising grocery prices changed the way you shop for food?
Here’s how some of your shopping habits have changed.
Judith - Bedford, NH: I have noticed the rising grocery prices. I usually went for the name brand items or items that I [was] very familiar with, and I just shopped a little faster than I do now. I spend a little more time checking prices now. Sometimes you can spend five minutes in the aisle looking at three different kinds of toilet paper to figure out which is the better toilet paper price-wise.
I think it would behoove grocery stores to make sure their signs are very clear for the customer to be able to read. I feel that information from the grocery stores and from wherever I can get it, helps me make decisions about the best way to use my grocery money.
John - Concord, NH: My wife and I, when we go shopping now, we go shopping with a list — which we didn't always do. Pre-COVID, we pretty much just went shopping. Now we make a list, and that list generally also involves a menu of the things we're going to cook that week, and so we shop for the menu mostly, with a few extra things that we need. That's pretty much how we contend with the prices now. And it's working out for us. We don't spend as much as we used to at the grocery store, so that's a good thing.
Mary - Piermont, NH: When I retired, I thought I had prepared well financially as much as I could, but now in 2025, prices are so different. So the way this has affected me in my shopping is that I'm relying a lot on what my parents taught me. My parents were children of the Depression, and they had habits of thrift that they passed on to me.
I read all the labels for both price and contents. I buy things when they're on sale. I find that I have to get the most food value I can out of what I buy. Making almost everything you eat yourself saves you money. I'll make something, make four to six servings or eight servings, and then package them and put them in the freezer. Frankly, I'm retired. I have the time to do that. If I were working all day, busy, particularly with a family, I wouldn't have the time to do this.
Lori - Concord, NH: Over the past couple of years, my grocery shopping has definitely changed. I used to go to a grocery store that I just preferred. I liked the parking lot, and I liked the brands. All those things were ahead of the pricing and they were all relatively the same in my mind anyway. But, I've learned over the last couple of years that they aren't. And now I shop at a different store now even though I don't like the parking lot, but I know it's consistently going to cost me less. I kind of pick and choose. There's certain things I know I can get at different stores, and so I do more of that than I used to do. I used to like to kind of add in a little something extra for myself, a little splurge, once a week or something like that. And I just don't do that anymore, you know? Which is kind of sad.
