This is a first for eight months that franceinfo has been monitoring receipts with a magnifying glass: the price of our shopping basket has hardly increased. Consult the situation in your department on our interactive map.
The sky is clearing up over the supermarkets. After seven months of continuous price increases on the labels, they stabilized between May and June. In total, the price of our franceinfo shopping basket, in partnership with France Bleu and NielsenIQ, increases “only” by 15 cents over a month. This is a minimal evolution compared to usual, where the basket increased by more than one euro per month.
>> MAP. Inflation: is your department one of the most expensive in France?
This weak increase explains the slowdown in inflation, which now stands at 16.07%. This is 0.75 points less than in May. But this is not the case everywhere. In the South-East of France, several departments such as Hautes-Alpes, Drôme and Var are seeing their inflation start to rise again. Bad news for tourists as summer approaches.
Consult the situation in your department on our interactive map:
With a total of nearly 132 euros, Paris remains the most expensive department in France. Like the previous franceinfo baskets, it is still the Vendeans who pay the least for their races.
Some prices are falling… but not enough
In detail, if prices stabilize, they do so on a very high plateau. Our 37 daily, food and hygiene products now cost 109.81 euros in total. This is almost 20 euros more than in January 2022, before the start of the inflation crisis. However, for the second consecutive month, some products in our basket continue to see their price decrease: the pack of branded chocolate biscuits (-15 cents), the pack of 12 rolls of first price toilet paper (-14 cents) and the liter of private label olive oil (-6 cents) are among the products that fell the most between May and June.
But these declines remain very small, of the order of a few cents. If we look over a longer period of time for the toilet paper pack, for example, its price has actually jumped 80 cents in 18 months. If there are therefore indisputable drops on the shelves, they are for the moment very largely insufficient to offset the price increases that we have known for more than a year and a half.
Another observation: the products whose price is falling are mainly first-price products or retailer brands. “This is because large retailers negotiate throughout the year with their suppliers on these ranges. They can therefore pass on the declines in the price of raw materials more quickly to cereals, rice or even oil”, explains Emmanuel Cannes, price and inflation expert at NielsenIQ. Conversely, branded products “are still sold with the prices negotiated in February”adds the expert, “so before the drop in commodity prices”. Some of the branded products even continue to increase sharply: the frozen lasagna tray, for example, increased by 19 cents in a single month, and the pack of four slices of white ham by 14 cents.
Towards lower prices?
So what is the trend for the next few months? “For the moment, I see very little evolution in the very short term”confides Emmanuel Cannes, of NielsenIQ, for whom inflation will continue its slow decline, and prices will stabilize on a high plateau. “We will never be able to find the prices of one or two years ago”reminds the expert: “Even if the raw materials fluctuate downwards, other components come into the determination of the price: wages, which have increased, but also packaging for example, and energy contracts, which are old. All these factors won’t go down again.”
A significant drop in shelf prices will therefore only occur if manufacturers and distributors reopen and conclude new negotiations. A prospect that seems to be receding. On franceinfo last week, Michel-Edouard Leclerc, president of the strategic committee of E.Leclerc centers, indicated that manufacturers “don’t rush” to renegotiate prices. A similar observation was already made in early June by the CEO of System U, Dominique Schelcher. Without these negotiations, NielsenIQ believes that prices will eventually come down, but very slowly, penny by penny.