Why an ice cream cone is $12

Ask either of my younger kids what their favorite food is, and they will tell you ice cream. They come by this honestly: as legend goes, I ate enough ice cream during my pregnancies that they themselves were originally made primarily of ice cream, and it’s only natural that they would now seek to refresh their supply at every opportunity. Also, I have set a family norm based on being from Boston, where people eat ice cream doggedly through even the coldest weather. This famous photo is from Washington, but this is what Boston looks like all winter, except that the people eating ice cream in the blizzard are also, inexplicably, jogging.

I tell you all this because something happened recently that struck me to the bone, mint chocolate chip-wise. After a birthday dinner on Washington’s touristy but undeniably charming Wharf strip, I proposed getting ice cream instead of cake, and discovered that the smallest possible Ben & Jerry’s ice cream at that location is now two scoops for $9. Nine dollars?! To add insult to injury, they are no longer offering a cone as part of your ice cream cone. That’ll be extra—$3.25, for a total of $12.25. As a consumer of Ben & Jerry’s since childhood, I found this shocking. A small ice cream cone is now worth nearly two hours of minimum wage labor (at least in Oklahoma, where perplexingly voters just elected to keep the minimum wage at $7.25)? How are people supposed to live like this?

This eye-popping price tag is certainly in part due to the touristy neighborhood—when I called the Church Street store in Ben & Jerry’s homeland of Burlington, Vermont, they quoted me a slightly more normal $7.20 including tax for two scoops, cone included. But still, this is a genuinely disturbing level of inflation within the little-treat economy, traditionally a solace as the cost of gas, electricity, groceries, and other necessities soar.

Bloomberg Businessweek just reported that ice cream inflation is widespread. “In the US, prices at scoop shops have jumped more than 35% since 2019, when the average cost of a cone was about $4.50, according to Technomic, a research firm,” write Stacey Vanek Smith and Deena Shanker. A food economist blamed a “perfect storm” of factors, including “the Covid-19 pandemic, social media, the job market, tariffs, war, the K-shaped economy.” Even data centers are theoretically part of the problem, by pushing electricity costs up for everyone.

Aaron Cohen, owner of Gracie’s Ice Cream in Somerville, MA, still manages to keep a kiddy cone under $5, but told me the store just raised prices by 10 to 15 cents on all their cones, attributing that to the rising cost of ingredients and supplies. “I didn’t [raise them] last year, and everything is more expensive,” he said. Cohen said that while dairy itself has not gone up by much, “Chocolate is at least twice as expensive as when we opened. We stopped making vanilla ice cream in 2017, because prices had gone up 700% from 2014, so now we just make sweet cream.” Ingredients like Oreos and M&Ms have recently gone up, too. All in all, he said, “Our batches of ice cream were costing $6 to $15 more per batch than they had been.” 

Cohen’s theory of the problem offers some insight into why inflation has been so tough to tackle, and suggests relief may still be distant: “Corporations used to not use price increases as a way of increasing margin. They would always try to increase sales. But during the pandemic, they increased prices and people kept buying – they just complained about it. The way you know it’s not just supply chain is that the prices never really went down to where they were,” he said. “For packaged goods, price increases were the stove that you didn’t want to touch. And then they touched the stove and didn’t get burned, so they’re like, “Well, we’re just going to keep touching it all the time.”

Cohen also explained the distinct economics of “vacation ice cream” and “neighborhood ice cream.” With the former, the logic is to get as much cash as possible out of each of a fixed number of customers you’ll never see again, while for their dollar offering them a large portion size; with the latter, the goal is to make a sustainable margin on a reasonable serving, to keep families like mine coming back every Friday night. (That explains the pricing at the Ben & Jerry’s on the Wharf; the store assumes its visitors are from out of town.)  

The ice cream price crisis is obviously the least of what troubles the economy—man, if not pregnant woman, can live without it—but it typifies why people are bursting with so much pent-up emotion about what is clearly not just a vibecession. Inflation for people who work for a living is very real, but people with fattening stock market portfolios may not care (or even, in Trump’s case, love it). Government money is being “saved” by cutting SNAP benefits that helped more than 770,000 of our poorest children eat, but Donald Trump brags publicly about burning $200,000,000 taxpayer dollars on bombs in the last two days of losing an unnecessary war. Our first on-paper trillionaire is minted through IPO sleight of hand, but runs most of his companies at a loss, spreads bigotry and disinformation, and leaves hundreds of thousands of children to die by cutting off American aid. And you’re making American parents tell their children they can’t even buy them an ice cream cone?

When things go right these days—say, for New York this past weekend, as the Knicks clinched the NBA championship—the intense reaction feels like catharsis, an overflow of shared joy in a world where ordinary people are being denied everyday pleasures. Politicians underestimate this frustration at their peril. New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has won over his city by leaning into the joy but also moving rapidly to try to ameliorate working people’s practical concerns. Washington, DC, similarly, given the choice to pick a mayoral primary candidate this week, made a bid for the more progressive and change-oriented candidate, Janeese Lewis George, who at press time was running well ahead of the more status-quo-aligned Kenyan McDuffie in all except the city’s wealthiest ward. (Does a sports championship come free with a Democratic socialist mayor? Only time will tell.) What seems increasingly likely is that politicians oriented toward conciliation and handshaking with bigots about whom to scapegoat are going to get steamrolled by an army of people who want their damn ice cream (and gas, and groceries, and civil liberties).

Anyway. Not all is lost for affordable refreshment in this summer of 2026. I need to tell you about the Watermelon Meow Meow, which is the cocktail I invented this past Saturday night, named by my six-year-old after this deranged children’s song. This drink involves first making watermelon juice—which is messy and takes a while but yields a ton of juice to drink straight or pour over seltzer or freeze to make popsicles—and then using that to make the world’s laziest cocktail. Watermelons, amid all the price increases, still seem relatively reasonable where I am. I made this originally with a $3.50 seedless watermelon from Giant that turned out to be subpar and in need of some zhuzhing, and then with half of an enormous $4.50 watermelon from Lidl. Either way, this recipe can be tweaked to suit your taste (and your particular watermelon), and is likely to please the children in your life just as much as it will adults who want to drink something cold while watching a beloved team close the deal. 

Ingredients:

Seedless watermelon (I used half of a huge 20-pound melon)
Citrus fruit: approximately 1 lime and 2 lemons (I also made it with a Meyer lemon, which was delicious. You can use all lime or all lemon if you prefer)
Half cup lemonade (optional)
2 tablespoons sugar (I used turbinado, which worked fine)
A pinch of Maldon salt (or any fine or flaky salt)

Instructions: 

1. Cut all the watermelon out of the rind into a big mixing bowl, adding in any juice that pools in the rind. Use an immersion blender to puree it all.
2. Juice the lime and one lemon into a measuring cup, removing any seeds, and stir into the watermelon juice. Add the lemonade. Add two tablespoons of sugar and a pinch of Maldon or other salt and stir.
3. Taste the juice. Add more citrus juice to taste till it is both very tart and quite sweet.
4. Use a food mill or strainer to strain out the watermelon pulp, gradually transferring the juice to a smaller bowl and then to a pitcher or jar. Chill and enjoy. 

Ingredients:

Watermelon juice
Black rum
Plain seltzer
Wedge of lime

Instructions:

Take a pint glass and fill 2/3 with ice. Add a shot of rum and four shots of watermelon juice. Top off with seltzer. Squeeze in one wedge of lime and run the lime around the edge of the glass. Stir gently and serve. Scream for your team to win.

If you’ve read this far: thank you. And if you haven’t yet, consider upgrading to become a paid member, which will allow you to expound in the comments on what you are seeing in your neighborhood ice cream stores and what else we should make to survive the summer. See you next time.