Consumers are tired of price increases. Brands are paying attention.
Until recently, Brooke Benson considered herself a Panera Bread loyalist.
Until recently, Brooke Benson considered herself a Panera Bread loyalist. For the past 12 years, the 40-year-old Orlando, Florida, resident said she’d make three to four trips there every week — an estimate her husband said was closer to four or five — to get her favorite soups.
But after the outpost of the restaurant chain near Benson’s home raised its price to $8.79 for the same bowl of soup that had cost $7.09 three years ago, she said she was done.
“I actually have been looking at soup at all these different places and comparing the prices,” Benson said by text. “I can get better soup in larger portions for cheaper” elsewhere, she said.
Panera Bread didn’t respond to a request for comment, but several big brands are now acknowledging that inflation-weary Americans are walking away from products and services that keep getting costlier.
Many companies that raised prices during the recovery from the pandemic cited higher costs for the ingredients, materials and labor needed to provide goods and services that many consumers were racing to buy. Those price hikes, exacerbated by supply chain snags in late 2021, helped push the annual inflation rate to a four-decade high of more than 9% by summer 2022. It has since fallen to 3.1%, meaning prices overall are still going up, albeit more slowly.
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