A trip to the grocery store these days feels more like a heist against our savings accounts lately. But seeing the cold, hard numbers side-by-side is a different kind of pain. TikTok creator Zoe Dippel (@zoedippel) recently struck a nerve with over 738,000 viewers after she unearthed a 1997 H-E-B bill saved by her mother-in-law.
The document serves as a time capsule from a world where you could feed a family, including twins, without taking out a second mortgage. Zoe decided to run a modern-day experiment by plugging all 122 items from that 1997 haul into the H-E-B curbside app to see what they would cost in 2026. The results are a stark indicator of just how much the cost of living has mutated over the last three decades.
