Home Alone Grocery Prices

About

Home Alone Grocery Prices refers to a scene from the 1999 comedy movie Home Alone in which Macaulay Culkin's character Kevin McCallister goes to the supermarket to buy groceries that amount to a $19.83 bill. The scene resurfaces during the holiday season starting in 2022, as people compare how much inflation has changed prices in three decades.

Origin

Home Alone premiered in the United States on November 10th, 1990 with the premise of an eight-year-old kid named Kevin accidentally being left behind when his family leaves for France. In one particular scene, Kevin goes to the supermarket to buy milk, bread, toilet paper, laundry detergent, fabric softener, cling wrap, macaroni-and-cheese, a turkey TV dinner, orange juice and a bag of plastic Army men. The groceries outing cost him $19.83. A video of the scene was posted on YouTube^[1] on August 30th, 2018, which amassed over 299,000 views and 2,000 likes in five years.

Spread

In November 2022, the Home Alone grocery scene went viral on the internet, as users tried to compare how much inflation changed the prices of some products over the decades. For instance, on November 18th, 2022, YouTube^[2] channel News Nation posted a video (shown below, left) showing how much Kevin’s groceries in ‘Home Alone’ cost today, which garnered roughly 2,300 views and 51 likes in a year. About a year later, on December 11th, 2023, FOX 11 Los Angeles^[3] posted a similar video (shown below, right) comparing what $20 can buy in groceries in 2023. The video garnered over 24,000 views and 98 likes in a week.

On December 9th, 2023, TikTok^[4] user @fmsmith319 posted the Fox News story about the Home Alone grocery prices (shown below, left), which amassed more than 6 million plays and 601,000 likes in a week. On December 12th, 2023, TikTok^[5] page @evie.magazine shared a video explaining the inflation (shown below, right) since the movie premiered in 1990, which amassed more than 11,000 plays and 542 likes in a week.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References