They took chicken wings off their menus for a while after a national shortage caused prices to skyrocket. They demanded $20 more per plate for their annual Christmas seafood platter. And they discontinued the all-you-can-eat crab-leg special on Tampa Bay Buccaneer game days.
“We just couldn’t do it this year,” announced Boland, who co-owns both the Galley and Mary Margaret’s Olde Irish Tavern, stressing that the price of a case of crab legs jumped from roughly $300 last year to more than $500 this year.
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And it’s not just food costs. There have been price increases for things Boland’s guests probably don’t even think about: a drum of fryer oil, up from roughly $20 to more than $50, or a case of biodegradable to-go boxes, up from roughly $50 to more than $100, he announced.
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“Those are things I can’t even pass the price down,” Boland told National Review. “It’s kind of a direct operating expense. How do I charge the guest more for a product they don’t even eat?”
While inflation has been a nationwide curse this year — the Consumer Price Index rose 6.8 percent over the year in November, almost a 40-year high — nowhere has it been worse than in the Tampa-St. Petersburg metro area. Inflation in the Tampa area increased 8 percent in a year in November, the highest rate of any of the almost two-dozen main metro areas tracked by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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Price enlargements have made it more difficult for people to feed their families, put gas in their cars, keep their businesses afloat, and afford a place to live. Year over year, food prices in the Tampa area are up 4.3 percent, clothing costs are up 7.2 percent, and rent is up 8.7 percent. Earlier this year, rent in Tampa was rising faster than any other U.S. metro area, according to a report in The Tampa Bay Times. And gas prices in Tampa have spiked a whopping 67.5 percent since last November, according to the BLS, which follows inflation in 23 American cities and urban regions, separating them into two lists, each reported every other month.
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Nationwide, inflation has been caused by a perfect recipe of natural and artificially induced demand, supply-chain bottlenecks, labor shortages, and low-interest rates. Though the BLS reports indicate that recently, inflation has been a more significant problem in Southern metro areas in states with Republican governors and in states with less onerous Covid-19 restrictions.
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