From trash bags to kitchen appliances, here's a slew of household staples that are about to get more expensive

  • Several companies including Procter & Gamble and General Mills have announced price hikes.

  • Clorox and Coca-Cola are also planning to raise prices to offset shipping costs.

  • The goods affected include paper products, kitchen appliances, and baby-care items.

  • See more stories on Insider's business page.

Many household goods are getting more expensive as companies like Clorox and Whirlpool plan to hike prices to combat shortages and rising shipping costs.

Clorox, the brand known for its antiseptic wipes and key household staples said during its quarterly earnings call it plans to increase prices for some of its Glad brand products. The price increases would impact the company's trash bags and food packaging items.

Clorox's Chief Financial Officer Kevin Jacobsen said the company's efforts to boost production to meet soaring need for its goods during the onset of the pandemic forced Clorox to incur additional expenses and the company is also working against higher material and shipping costs.

Whirlpool, the maker of KitchenAid and several other household devices, raised its prices between 5% and 12% in April.

KitchenAid 5 Quart Stand Mixer
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The company's CEO, Mark Bitzer, told CNBC the price hike can be attributed to rising material costs caused by the Texas freeze, as well as port delays, and the global chip shortage.

Procter & Gamble and General Mills also announced price hikes.

During its third-quarter earnings call last month, P&G said it had started raising the prices of some of its goods, including baby-care and feminine-care products and adult diapers from its brands such as Pampers, Tampax, and Always.

"The exact amount of the price increase will vary by brand and sub-brand in the range of mid-to-high single-digit percentages and will go into effect in mid-September," P&G said in a statement.

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Associated Press

Some of P&G's primary competitors, including Kimberly-Clark, have announced similar price increases. In March, Kimberly-Clark said it would increase the prices of top products like Scott toilet paper and Huggies diapers.

General Mills' chief financial officer, Kofi Bruce, said during the company's March earnings call that it was planning to increase its prices to offset rising commodity costs as its margins continued to fall. While the company did not specify what products would be affected, General Mills' lineup of brands includes Cheerios, Chex, Betty Crocker, and Pillsbury products.

In April, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey told CNBC that the company was planning to hike its prices for the first time in over three years. Quincey did not specify the products that would be affected.

Quincey said Coca-Cola planned to implement the price hikes "intelligently, thinking through the way we use package sizes and really optimize the price points for consumers."

Coffee prices are also set to skyrocket. Peet's and J.M. Smucker, the brand behind Folgers and Dunkin' coffee, have said they're facing rising costs. Reuters reported that in February, port delays pushed coffee prices to their highest level in over a year.

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Associated Press

J.M. Smucker also increased the price of its Jif peanut-butter products in August.

Many of these companies said sales had continued to rise in the last quarter, even from the previous year, when some people were stockpiling products at the beginning of the pandemic. While an increase in demand can only be a positive for companies, demand is outstripping supply and driving up the price of some goods.

Consumer interest is rising as the products are getting increasingly difficult to obtain because of a shipping-container shortage and port congestion.

March data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Consumer Price Index indicated that as vaccination rates increase, prices go up. Consumer prices increased in 2021 over last year at their highest rate in three years.

While there has been a large increase in the price of gasoline, the cost of food, rental cars, and hotels have also pushed higher.

For products from the brands of top companies like P&G, people are likely to see inflated prices at the grocery store as demand compounds on vaccine optimism and port congestion shows no sign of clearing.

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