Harger: Grocery prices in WA are already painful, but new legislative proposals could make them even worse

Grocery prices are getting ridiculous.

You don’t need a chart to tell you that. You just need to stand at the checkout line and watch the total climb while you’re thinking, wait, how did we spend two hundred bucks? We didn’t even buy steak.

And groceries hit differently than other inflation. You can put off buying a new TV. You can wait on a vacation. You can skip Amazon for a month. But you can’t skip dinner. Everyone needs to eat.

That’s why a letter I got last week from the Northwest Grocery Retail Association caught my attention.

Their message to Olympia is simple: Please stop piling on new costs.

They say the legislature is considering a whole stack of bills that would increase the cost of operating grocery stores in Washington. A bottle deposit system. A moratorium on electronic shelf labels. Packaging mandates. Publicly owned grocery stores. More fees and penalties around closures and vacancies. A statewide tax on sugary beverages. Even possible excise tax increases on items that are sitting on grocery shelves. A statewide payroll tax. Expanding local B&O taxes.

Now, take any one of these ideas by itself, and I can see why someone would like it. Some of them might even be good policy. I’m not here to say every proposal is terrible. I’m saying the pile is getting tall.

Because grocery stores don’t work like Boeing or Microsoft. They operate on razor-thin margins. When their costs go up, they don’t have room to absorb it. They’ve got two options. Raise prices or stop offering the service.

And the letter from the association puts a number on it. They claimed one grocery retailer is looking at up to $39 million dollars in new state and local taxes in 2026. Thirty-nine million.

Where do we think that comes from?

It doesn’t come from a magic corporate vault. It comes from your wallet. From the family buying cereal, diapers, and chicken thighs, trying to stretch it to payday.

We keep saying we care about affordability. Olympia is full of speeches about helping working people. But if you make it more expensive to operate a grocery store, groceries get more expensive.

And this is where I try to be fair. Some of these bills are aimed at real problems. Environmental waste is real. Health care costs are real. Worker protections are real. I’m not dismissing any of that.

But we don’t get to pretend there are no trade-offs.

You can’t pile on mandates, taxes, and compliance costs, then act surprised when the price of food goes up again. You can’t say you’re fighting for working families while quietly making the most basic necessity of life — food — more expensive.

The grocery association is asking lawmakers to pause. Not to stop caring about the environment or workers. Just to look at the cumulative impact of all these bills together.

If lawmakers want to help working families, here’s a simple test for every new proposal.

Before you vote on it, ask yourself: What does this do to the price of groceries? Because people are already doing that math at home, and a lot of them are coming up short.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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