Remember that up until the fall, commodity prices (oil, corn, etc) were going up dramatically….you must have missed the stories about Costco limiting the amount of rice people could buy, and increasing starvation in poorer countries because the grains they survive on were 4 times as high as they had been. Well, most salty and sweet snacks in particular use some form of corn, whether it’s the ground corn in chips or the high fructose corn syrup in just about everything else. Now a lto of manufacturers tried to hide their price increases by keeping their foods the same price, but making the containers smaller (next time you go to the store to by a 1/2 gallon of ice cream, notice that you’ll really be buying 1 1/2 quarts). Just the cost of oil going through the roof caused a huge spike in corn prices, because it takes oil to harvest corn, and that spike in corn prices fed through the market as I described. But you’ll notice that oil prices started their dramatic rise almost 2 years ago, and just started to come down a few months ago. Well, corn prices follow oil prices, and food prices follow corn prices, there’s a lag. So you’re seeing he first few months of 2 years of rising prices in oil, so prices at the grocery store will continue to go up for another year or so before they start to come down again.