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Customers Are Running Out of Money: Tariffs, Sticky Prices, and Your Budget

Budgeting

June 11, 2026 · WIMM team

CEOs say their customers are running out of money. Food is up about a third since 2020 and energy has spiked sharply, and those prices never came back down. Here is what that means for your budget.

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In the spring of 2026, the head of one of the largest food companies in America said the quiet part out loud. Steve Cahillane, the chief executive of Kraft Heinz, told the Wall Street Journal that his customers are "literally running out of money toward the end of the month." He was not describing a recession. He was describing the new normal: paychecks that run dry before the next one lands, and grocery carts that cost more than they used to for the same food.

A shopper paying at a supermarket checkout, where higher prices show up first

Photo by Permadi Creative on Unsplash

He is not alone. On earnings call after earnings call, the companies that sell us appliances, fast food, and packaged goods have started saying the same thing. Whirlpool's leadership compared the drop in appliance demand to the 2008 financial crisis. Restaurant chains have noted that their more value-conscious guests are eating at home more often. When the businesses whose entire job is to sell you things start warning that you cannot afford them, it is worth paying attention.

Tariffs are politically charged. Your budget is not. Whatever you think about trade policy, the cart costs more, the bill is higher, and the question worth asking is a practical one: what happened to prices, why have they stayed high, and what can you actually do about it.

The prices went up, and they stayed up

Start with the numbers, because they explain the mood. Since the start of 2020, overall consumer prices are up roughly 30 percent, based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U index through May 2026. That is the average. The categories that hit a household every single week have moved more. Food at home is up by roughly a third. Energy is far more volatile, and it has swung even harder. By 2026 it sits well above where it was before the pandemic, helped along by a fresh spike tied to conflict in the Middle East that pushed gasoline up about 40 percent in a single year.

A gas station price sign, where energy costs are the most visible part of the squeeze

Photo by Rock Staar on Unsplash

Here is the part that surprises people. Inflation has actually slowed. The rate of increase in 2026 is a fraction of the painful peaks of 2022. And yet nothing feels cheaper. That is not your imagination, and it is not a contradiction. It is the single most misunderstood fact in personal finance right now, and it is the reason the gap between the headlines and your wallet feels so wide.

Why prices do not come back down

There is a difference between inflation slowing down and prices falling. Economists call the first one disinflation. When inflation cools, prices do not drop. They climb more slowly than before. The high prices you are already paying become the new floor, not a temporary spike that reverses.

As one economist put it, "once a food price goes up, it tends to stay up." Outside of a deep recession, prices very rarely fall across the board, because broadly falling prices usually mean people have stopped spending entirely, which is its own kind of disaster. So the realistic outcome is not relief. It is a slower rate of getting more expensive, on top of a level that already hurts.

This short explainer walks through why a lower inflation rate does not put money back in your pocket:

Why are prices still high if the inflation rate is dropping?by CBS News · YouTube

Did they raise prices because they had to, or because they could?

This is the question everyone is really asking, and the honest answer is: some of both, and it depends on the company.

On one side, costs genuinely rose. Supply chains seized up after 2020, energy spiked after the invasion of Ukraine, and the tariffs rolled out across 2025 and 2026 added a real, new layer of import cost to coffee, seafood, produce, appliances, and a long list of other goods. Those costs are not invented. A company importing components that now carry a duty really does pay more, and some of that lands on the shelf price.

On the other side, a cost shock is also excellent cover. When every headline is about inflation, a price increase that goes a little beyond what costs actually require is easy to hide in the noise. One analysis from the Groundwork Collaborative estimated that corporate profits drove more than half of inflation in the second and third quarters of 2023, and more than a third of it since the pandemic began, compared with roughly 11 percent in the four decades before. Other economists, including researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, pushed back hard, finding that economy-wide profit margins stayed essentially flat and that the "greedflation" story was overstated.

Both things can be true at once. In competitive categories with thin margins, companies mostly passed through real costs. In categories with a handful of dominant players and a loyal customer base, some of them clearly took the opportunity to widen margins, because they could, and the customer had nowhere else to go. The result for you is the same either way: a higher bill.

Note

Whichever side of the had-to-or-could debate you land on, the household response is identical. You cannot un-raise a price. You can only see clearly where the money is going and decide what to do next.

What a tapped-out household actually does

"Running out of money at the end of the month" is a cash-flow problem, and cash-flow problems are solvable once you can see them. That is the entire reason WIMM exists. Three moves matter most.

See the squeeze across every category, not just groceries

It is easy to notice that food costs more. It is harder to see that your energy bill, your streaming stack, your insurance, and your favorite takeout have all drifted up at the same time, quietly, a few dollars each. WIMM's spending trends show six months of every category side by side, so the slow creep becomes visible instead of invisible. The increases that hurt most are usually the ones too small to notice on any single statement.

Reset the budget to the prices you actually pay

A budget built on 2021 prices is fiction. If your grocery category is set to a number you have not actually hit in a year, it is not a budget, it is a wish. WIMM's Backtest, which is free, runs your proposed budget against your real spending history and scores whether it would have survived. Set the categories to the new normal, not the old one, and you stop starting every month already behind. Apps like YNAB built a devoted following on this idea of budgeting to reality. WIMM gives you the same discipline with the receipts to prove it.

Catch the increases that sneak in

Some of the squeeze is not inflation at all. It is a subscription that renewed at a higher rate, or a promotional price that quietly ended. WIMM flags unusual charges and surfaces the recurring payments you may have forgotten, so a price hike you never agreed to does not just become part of the furniture.

You cannot control whether a company raised prices because it had to or because it could. You can control whether you notice.— The practical takeaway

The point

The CEOs are right that a lot of households are running out of money before the month is over. They are less eager to mention that their own pricing decisions are part of the story. You do not get a vote on that. What you do get is a clear view of your own money and the ability to build a plan around the prices that actually exist, instead of the ones you wish were still around.

WIMM's live demo loads with real sample data already categorized, so you can open the budgets view, set your categories to today's prices, and watch the plan update in real time: app.wimm.money/demo?mode=envelope.

References

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