There was a time when grocery shopping was a run-of-the-mill errand, not an insulting stress test that required mental math in every aisle and questions like, “Do we really need eggs this month?”
That time, apparently, was in the 1990s.
A Texas woman named Zoe Dippel found a 122-item H-E-B grocery receipt from June 20, 1997, and shared it on TikTok last month to show how cheap food used to be.
“I wish,” Dippel wrote in the caption of the video. The result: a viral gut punch that racked up millions of views and close to 3,000 comments of people grieving the time when food wasn’t a luxury.
The receipt, which is visibly long and would likely send you into a spiral today, featured about 122 essentials like fruits and vegetables, diapers, and baby food, and totaled just $155.
“Just bought 28 items for $127.03,” reads one of the comments on the video. “I’m sorry CENTS?!?!! Veggies were in CENTS???” asked another enraged commentator.
Dippel painstakingly dissected the 1997 receipt and compared the prices of the items to their 2026 counterparts, and the sticker shock was more than guaranteed.
A bag of coffee was $2.47 in 1997, compared to $9.43 today. A package of diapers increased from $12.99 to $31.47, while Little Debbie’s brownies went from $1.09 to $5.75.
After tallying the items in H-E-B’s shopping app and factoring in the slight curbside markup, Dippel found the present-day total had jumped about 220% to nearly $500.
That 1997 receipt is not an isolated relic. A similar wave of disbelief hit Reddit when a user shared a 1998 H-E-B receipt they found tucked inside their late grandmother’s purse.
The total for 23 items came out to just over $30. Redditors compared item by item and found the 18-count eggs that cost $1.45 in 1998 were priced up around $8.50 in 2025. Bread that once cost 59 cents is now more than double that. Bell peppers, bacon, detergent, and pantry staples all showed steep increases.
Depending on substitutions and whether curbside pricing was included, the recreated 23-item cart totaled between roughly $90 and $110 — more than triple the original $30 receipt.
“We’re being robbed and just accepting it,” said one user on the Reddit thread.
“Cries in 2025,” added another.
In a separate Reddit thread, one user shared a Walmart receipt from 1997 with roughly 20 items totaling just under $30. Doritos at $2, syrup at $1.77, and the highest-priced item on the list is a package of turkey breast priced at $5.41.
So after this trip down memory lane — back when grocery shopping didn’t require a second mortgage — you might wonder: Is it really that bad today? Yes. It is. But hey, at least it’s slowing.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, food prices were still up 2.9% year over year in January 2026, with grocery prices rising 2.1%. That’s slower than the spikes of recent years, but it’s still growth layered on top of already elevated costs. Fingers crossed that by March, we might be able to afford ground beef again
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