In Iran, prices rise by the hour under Trump’s crushing blockade

Akhtar MakoiiThu, June 4, 2026 at 5:00 AM UTC

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Food prices have surged as the blockade puts pressure on the Iranian economy - Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images

The corner shop near Jalal's home has a new sign taped to its door. "Ask for prices before you shop, because they go up," it reads.

"And they really do," says Jalal, a 35-year-old Iranian who recently lost his job at a small factory near Tehran. "Prices are going up by the hour."

On Tuesday, he bought a small pack of cheese for 270,000 tomans (£1.12). On Wednesday, the same was 370,000 (£1.54). "The shop owner says most of the time he cannot buy the same item at the same price the next day, so he raises his prices," he said.

In Iran, the average daily salary is one million toman, which is about £4.20 at current falling market rates. But prices across the country are climbing so fast that shopkeepers cannot keep pace, and families are being pushed towards crisis.

Ordinary Iranians, such as Jalal, are paying the price for two crises they did not create.

The first is a naval blockade that the US military has enforced in the Gulf since April 13, choking the oil exports that fund the economy and severing the supply lines that Iranian factories and importers depend on.

The facade of a building in Tehran depicts the Strait of Hormuz with the caption saying it will be 'Forever in Iran's Hand' - Atta Kenare/AFP via Getty Images

As ships are turned back from Iran's southern ports and trade slows to a trickle, the cost of nearly everything – food, fuel, medicine, transport – has surged, and the squeeze is felt not in government offices but in kitchens, factories and corner shops.

The second is an inflation that has spun out of control, eroding wages and savings faster than families can adapt.

The Telegraph spoke with several people who described prices as out of control, with basic necessities becoming increasingly unaffordable.

Jalal lost his job when his factory ran out of cash. "They were losing money, they could not buy the materials any more, and they fired 26 of us," he says.

The grocery prices haunt him less than his fears for his four-year-old daughter.

"People are having the grief of bread," he says, using a Persian expression for worry about food and basic necessities. "I'm embarrassed in front of her. I can't afford to buy her anything but food, if I can.

"When I leave in the morning to stand at a roundabout looking for a daily job, she asks me, 'Can I have that toy? Can I have this toy?'

"But I cannot get her anything. When I find work, I bring her an apple or something. Some nights I come home so late she's already asleep and doesn't see me."

His account is echoed in official figures that have alarmed even Iran's own economists.

Annual inflation reached 57.7 per cent in the month ending in late May, the third consecutive month it broke an eight-decade record, rising four percentage points from the month before, according to the Statistical Centre of Iran.

But the pain is concentrated in everyday goods and the rate families actually feel has climbed to nearly 84 per cent.

Food prices have risen roughly 130 per cent in 12 months, nearly twice the overall rate.

Within that category, the basics on an Iranian table have soared far higher: rice is up 223 per cent, chicken 287 per cent, eggs 343 per cent, liquid cooking oil 354 per cent and solid cooking oil 431 per cent.

A potato, by contrast, costs less than 20 per cent more – a sign of how unevenly the crisis falls even within a single shopping basket.

Ehsan, a 32-year-old father of two who works in a small business in Isfahan, earns 30 million tomans a month – about £125 at current rates of roughly 240,000 tomans to the pound.

It does not last a week.

"I get paid on the first Saturday of each month, and by Wednesday it's all gone," he says. "It goes for rent, food, travel to work and the money I borrowed from relatives during the month. And I'm still in debt – a lot – just going by the day."

When the cash runs out, he calls relatives, who usually have nothing to lend.

"It is just us borrowing money from each other to survive," he adds. "The shop owner on our street also wants money from me, because I bought things and didn't pay. People have no money left. It was not like this during the war. But now it gets worse every day."

The strain is not shared equally.

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Rural inflation has surpassed 100 per cent, more than 20 percentage points higher than in the cities. For the lowest-earning Iranians – the bottom two income groups – prices have risen more than 95 per cent during the year, against about 82 per cent for the wealthiest.

Shoppers at the Grand Bazaar in Tehran, where inflation is the lowest rate in the country - Vahid Salemi/AP Photo

Western provinces including Lorestan, Kurdistan, Kermanshah and Ilam have seen prices more than double.

Tehran, at about 69 per cent, has the lowest rate in the country, a gap that points to a widening divide between the capital and everywhere else.

Even before the war, Iran's parliamentary research centre estimated that 26 million people – about 30 per cent of the population – were living in absolute poverty.

Many economists argue the root cause lies in both the war, and in a government decision made before it.

In the winter, authorities scrapped a subsidised exchange rate of 28,500 tomans to the dollar, replacing it with rates above 110,000. The move, presented as a "liberalisation", sent production costs surging.

However, Morteza Afgheh, a Tehran-based economist, warned that the war's true economic damage had yet to arrive, because the government stocked warehouses in advance. "What we have seen so far has been more the anticipated effects of war, not its real effects," he said.

He added: "But if no agreement is reached, the naval blockade continues, and this situation of neither war nor peace persists, its economic consequences will gradually become apparent." Among these would be further currency depreciation, more inflation and worsening unemployment, "likely with greater intensity".

The blockade he refers to is Donald Trump's. US naval forces have throttled traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and Iran's southern ports.

The squeeze shows a pattern of decades of Western pressure on Tehran, where sanctions and blockades aimed at the government fall hardest on ordinary citizens.

People relax under arches of Khajou Bridge in Isfahan as many avoid cafes as prices surge - Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images

Officials and politically connected firms with access to preferential credit can weather the storm. It is the factory worker and the rationing parent who pay.

Arash, a 29-year-old father of one in a small city outside Tehran, gave the crisis its name.

"I get paid 1.2m tomans a day, but my expenses are over 2m," he says.

He adds: "Everything is very expensive, and there are rumours it will get even more expensive. It's like a famine – but the difference is that the things are in the shops. It's the money that's missing. It's a famine of money."

He listed the new prices from memory.

A loaf of barbari bread that cost 3,000 tomans a few months ago now costs 8,000. A kilo of apricots has gone from 150,000 to 500,000. Red meat sells for 2.5m tomans a kilo, more than £10.

"People are very worried," he says. "They hope they can make a deal that would make our lives better."

He notices one other change since the fighting stopped: more checkpoints on the streets, and many women walking without the mandatory headscarf, unchallenged.

The crisis is also reshaping the small rhythms of daily life.

A cafe in north-east Tehran was damaged by a blast wave from an Iranian drone strike - Sobhan Farajvan/Pacific Press/Getty Images

Sima, a 27-year-old computer science graduate in Tehran, said she and her friends had given up the cafes that once anchored their week.

"Each time would cost us millions, and only one of us has a job," she says. "Now we just go to parks, or look for a cheap place. We sometimes joke that we should just get married."

She laughs.

"It's difficult, and you don't know when things will get better, so we are just watching. That's all we can do."

She sold her car last year and regrets it: the same model now costs four times what she was paid. "It could have been a good investment," she says.

For now, the only certainty is the sign on the shop door, and the daily calculation it forces on millions of people: what to buy today, and what to leave until tomorrow, when it will inevitably cost more.

Names have been changed to protect identities.

Original Article on Source

Source: “AOL Money”