With grocery prices skyrocketing, state Attorney General William Tong launched an investigation Thursday into whether major grocery retailers have engaged in price gouging.
At the same time, Senate Democrats pledged to push an amendment that would give Tong increased authority to conduct price-gouging inquiries and potentially have as much power as attorneys general in New York and Massachusetts. Currently, Tong has the power to deal with retailers but not suppliers who are higher up in the food chain. Democrats are seeking to vote on increasing the powers before the regular legislative session ends on May 8.
Senate majority leader Bob Duff, a Norwalk Democrat, says he has been stunned, like other consumers, when shopping for groceries.
“If you also leave the grocery store shocked by the amount that’s on the receipt, you are not alone and it is not in your head,” Duff told reporters. “Publicly available data suggests that the increase in grocery prices is due to stores’ increasing revenue — not inflation. … Corporate profits are at a 70-year high.”
Duff cited a detailed, 67-page report by the Federal Trade Commission on the impact of grocery prices since the coronavirus pandemic, saying that profits have jumped sharply.
“Grocery stores have made a mess on aisle 5, and we need the attorney general to help us clean it up,” Duff said during a news conference at the state Capitol complex.
Senate President Pro Tempore Martin Looney, a liberal Democrat from New Haven, said that price spikes have occurred through the years for limited durations of time, including the price of roof rakes during major snow storms and the price of generators during extended power outages.
“We’re looking at a different kind of price gouging and profiteering here,” Looney said Thursday. “It really is a crisis of a different order.”
Noting that increases have happened historically, Looney said, “It’s not new. Unfortunately, it’s one of the ugly faces of capitalism.”
But Republicans pushed back, saying that much of the inflation is due to the spending policies of President Joe Biden, a Democrat who is locked in a tight re-election battle against former President Donald J. Trump.
“Soaring food prices are crushing families nationwide and here in Connecticut, where Democrats are using a flimsy study to gaslight frustrated residents by trying to shift blame away from the Biden administration’s failures to get inflation under control,” said a joint statement by Senate Republican leader Stephen Harding and House GOP leader Vincent Candelora. “Instead of this transparent PR stunt, Democrats should look in the mirror and face the reality that their decisions, coupled with Bidenomics, have compounded the financial stress faced by residents who are tired of paying an arm and a leg for a bag of chips.”
State Rep. Dave Rutigliano, a Trumbull Republican who operates six restaurants and a brewery, said part of the blame belongs on Democrats who supported instituting the highway use tax that is projected to raise $90 million annually from large tractor trailer trucks that use Connecticut highways. The tax started on Jan. 1, 2023 and is supported by Democratic legislators and Gov. Ned Lamont.
“Everything we buy, use, wear comes on a truck,” Rutigliano told reporters.
Limited by the law
Even someone as prominent as the state attorney general is impacted by inflation.
“Two things really bother me, and that’s the price of nuts and the price of eggs,” Tong told reporters. “I eat a lot of nuts. If you like almonds, like I do, they’re super expensive. And the price of almonds are ever going up. I’m also a big fan of soft-boiled and hard-boiled eggs.”
Tong added, “The cost, not even organic eggs, but basic eggs in the supermarket sometimes are several dollars higher than they used to be. And that really hits all of us, all families here in Connecticut. Nuts, eggs, things that all of us depend on every single day to live.”
When egg prices spiked sharply during the coronavirus pandemic, New York state took the lead by filing a lawsuit in August 2020 against a major egg producer for price-gouging. The producer denied the charges. Similar lawsuits were filed against an egg producer in Texas and major food chains in California.
“We were unable to take action in Connecticut because our price-gouging statute still limits us to the immediate retailer,” Tong said. “We don’t have the ability to go up the chain to producers and manufacturers, the big guys, the top of the supply chain.”
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said in an interview Thursday that he hears just as many complaints about grocery prices as he does about high rental prices for Connecticut apartments.
“Obviously, inflation is in a different place today than it was two years ago,” Murphy told The Courant. “Joe Biden has done a credible job in helping to get prices down, but they’re still too high.”
Christopher Keating can be reached at ckeating@courant.com
