Given that the grocer spent only $650 on marketing this year, you know that this is 54% of his marketing budget last year.
You can rewrite a percent as a Decimal Number by dividing it by 100:
[tex]\frac{54}{100}=0.54[/tex]Let be "x" the amount of money (in dollars) the grocer spent on marketing last year.
Knowing all the data, you can set up the following equation:
[tex]x-0.54x=650[/tex]When you solve for "x", you get:
[tex]0.46x=650[/tex][tex]\begin{gathered} x=\frac{650}{0.46} \\ \\ x\approx1413.04 \end{gathered}[/tex]Hence, the answer is: He spent $1,413.04 .