Consumer prices rose at a modest pace in the Bay Area in February.
Egg shelves are partially stocked at a Safeway store on Redwood Road in Oakland, as seen in December 2024.
Consumer prices rose at a modest pace in the Bay Area in February.
Subscribe to continue reading this article.
Already subscribed? To login in, click here.
Consumer prices rose at a modest pace in the Bay Area in February in a sign that the years-long increases in the region’s cost of living have finally begun to cool off, a new federal government report shows.
The Bay Area inflation rate, as measured by consumer prices, rose by an annual pace of 2.7% in February compared with the same month the year before, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday.
The region’s consumer prices have remained below what many economists deem to be a key 3% level for several months. The last time consumer prices were above 3% was in June 2024.
Food prices in the Bay Area were up 1.6% in February compared to the year before, the federal labor agency reported. The cost of food consumed at home fell at a yearly pace of 0.6%, while the price of food consumed away from home hopped higher by 4.6%.
In a reflection of the wide-ranging shortages of eggs nationwide, the cost of meat, poultry, fish and eggs zoomed higher by 6.8%. Prices for this category began to rise in December and then continued to soar in January and February.
Unleaded gasoline prices jumped by 5.6% in the region as measured by their yearly change. February’s prices in the Bay Area were influenced by the fallout from a fire that knocked a Martinez refinery out of service.
Nationwide, consumer prices rose 2.8%.
The current pace of consumer prices in the Bay Area is far less than the pattern of elevated inflation that surfaced in April 2021.
Consumer prices spiked to a 40-year high in the Bay Area in June 2022 when they skyrocketed at a yearly pace of 6.8%. Prices began to retreat from their elevated levels in this region in mid-2024, according to the federal labor agency’s reports.