Should government regulate food prices at grocery stores? What Americans say in new poll

A majority of Americans believe the U.S. government should take action to regulate food prices, new polling reveals.

In a May 13 survey from Data for Progress, a left-leaning polling firm, 69% of respondents — including a majority of Democrats and Republicans — said the government “should do more to regulate grocery stores that raise prices to maximize profits.”

A quarter of respondents said the government should not take action that would impede upon grocery stores’ business practices.

The survey, conducted from May 10 to 11, sampled 1,168 likely voters from around the country and has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

A slightly larger share of respondents, 71%, said the government should “do more to regulate corporate food producers that raise prices to maximize profits.” This figure included a majority of Democrats and Republicans.

Meanwhile, 23% said the government should not step in to regulate food producers.

Additionally, 69% of respondents said they would support the government establishing a task force to probe food producers and grocery stores that increase prices to boost profits. One-quarter of respondents said they opposed such a measure.

The poll found that 74% of respondents said food prices in their neighborhood have increased in the past month, while 22% said they’ve remained stable, and 3% said they’ve gone down.

Over the past four years, food prices have risen by 25%, the second largest category increase behind transportation costs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

As a result of rising prices, nearly two-thirds of Americans struggle to afford groceries, according to a December survey from Swiftly, a retail tech company. The survey sampled 1,500 participants.

Price controls have been implemented before in the U.S. In 1971, amid soaring inflation, President Richard Nixon announced a nationwide freeze on all prices and wages.

However, many economists believe controls are not an effective measure for reigning in an overheated economy.

In a 2022, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business survey of economists, 23% said price controls can reduce inflation, while 49% said they could not.

“They could reduce inflation but the consequence would be shortages and rationing,” Oliver Hart, an economist at Harvard University, said in a university news release.

“There might be some ephemeral success because of the way inflation is measured, but longer-run, price controls would be ineffective,” James Stock, a Harvard University economist, added.

A 2021 Harvard Business School study of price controls in Argentina reached a similar conclusion, finding that they have a “small and short-lived” impact on inflation.