PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Inflation continues to soar across the country, hitting American consumers right in the wallet.
The U.S. Department of Labor announced this week that consumer prices jumped 7.5% last month, compared to this time last year.
"Things have doubled in price overnight. It's mind blowing,” said Vinnie Iovine, one of the owners of Iovine Brothers Produce in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market.
“It's destroying my brother and I, quite frankly. We're just hoping it's going to change a little bit as time moves forward and things will come back down to reality, because right now, this is not sustainable."
Iovine says costs have gone up across the board — from boxes and containers, to trucking, to the actual price of produce — with no end in sight just yet.
"We just see the customer choosing harder. Like, they're really looking and deciding what they want to do. And it's hard, because things have gone up,” Iovine said.
Iovine says they have taken on some of the cost to help keep their prices down, but the business has still had to pass some of it down to the customer.
"When you're trying to sell an orange for a dollar, but really my markup should be $1.50, that's a lot of money for a single piece of fruit. So that's where we have troubles — when we try to price accordingly to see what people will still take it for."
In the more than 30 years they have been in business, Iovine says, he has never seen anything quite like this.
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