The US grocery slowdown is real(bain.com) |
The US grocery slowdown is real(bain.com) |
It cuts back some of the fig leaves
I used to eat high quality fish every week, now it’s beans and cheaper cuts of chicken. And we make good money, but our wages have gone down since 2022 when adjusted for inflation.
Where I am in the US, you can get a dozen eggs for ~$2 at Walmart. A loaf of bread with 22 slices is like $2 to $6 depending on store brand vs name brand. The canned refried beans I buy are still $1.30 to $1.50 for 4-5 servings.
Some stuff is way too expensive (beef) but other food items seem at normal prices to me.
Rent is the only part of our economy in which money is forcibly taken at gunpoint by someone who never did any work to earn it.
The groceries at the grocery store are expensive because of the grocery store's rent, too.
???
Maybe if you're buying organic grass fed steaks every day, but chicken/pork is still available for less than $5, especially on sale. Kroger's weekly ad for Dallas, TX shows:
1. beef for $6.97/lb
2. pork for $1.99/lb
3. chicken breasts for $3.99/lb, or organic for $6.99/lb
The current situation will be the new normal for at least the next several years. Chicken hasn't risen nearly as much, just moderately more than inflation, perhaps because of a shift of demand away from beef.
There also seems to be greater price discrimination going on with beef than previously, with larger spreads between, e.g., bulk ground vs vacuum packed ground vs whole cuts.
https://www.usda.gov/about-food/food-safety/food-loss-and-wa...
> food waste is estimated at ... 133 billion pounds ... in 2010.
USA population in 2010 was 311M. 133B / 311M = 427 pounds per person.
I sincerely doubt the average consumer throws away 427 pounds of fresh food in a year.
We simply stopped buying food in the grocery store across the street: Amazon fresh on many positions can be like 50% cheaper.
So here's page with a line chart and downloadable CSV data, with a ~79 year lookback best as could quickly be found [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA
In short: Don't worry, this one is just a 1974 or 2008 or 1992 or 1981 style blip. Hopefully. It always recovered before. (Before 1947, data is sketchy/excluded though.)
People did wait in soup and bread lines in the 1930s, I think. Check the online libraries, you'll find entire books from the early 1900s on how to make economical tasty meals on a shoestring budget.
We can do better. But it's not going to be by relying on large corps to help us out, probably.
It's going to be by reinventing the systems that are utterly broken.
[0] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Real personal consumption expenditures: Nondurable goods: Food and beverages purchased for off-premises consumption (chain-type quantity index). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA
I buy the highest quality, lowest cost stuff I can find.
There can be a positive story here maybe though:
- More doordash = less grocery
- More farmer's market = less grocery
- More home-grown = less grocery
Though TFA points out,
80% of Americans say they're still trying to spend less
28% are actively trying to cut back on groceries
56% are trading down to lower-priced brands
49% are simply buying fewer items,
44% are leaning harder on coupons and promotions
Grocery prices at Aldi, Walmart, Costco are amazingly low, especially when accounting for the freshness, quality, and variety of foods today vs. 30 years ago.
Many prices at those places have doubled in the last ten years or less.
doesn't surprise me that people are trying to get their dollars to stretch further by buying in bulk, planning ahead more consciously, etc.
Restaurants have always been rather low margin, and they're buying ingredients a heckofa lot cheaper than a single shopper can.
How much does 7% of the population spending 4% less on groceries impact the numbers in the original article?
My sedentary, calorie dense, UberEats-at-2am 5000 calorie lifestyle isn't why I'm fat -- it's the "seed oils".
https://www.usatoday.com/story/grocery/2026/07/08/walmart-ro...
>The Walmart price reductions "looks less like a turning point on food inflation and more like an aggressive summer promotion," David Ortega, a food economist and professor at Michigan State University
Also the your claim that "Trump put a little orange thumb on the scale by choosing Walmart to be the winner on beef prices" doesn't make any sense. This isn't the soviet union. The government doesn't control enough production to be able to offer walmart sweetheart deals. The best they can do is browbeat walmart into lowering prices, but that's not the same as "choosing Walmart to be the winner".
Seems pretty straightforward. They increased their price to try and make up for losses, which in turn mean less people purchasing, which they responded to by increasing prices. A lovely little circle.
Maybe some economists should investigate how prices effects demand, could be groundbreaking.
Another quote that springs to mind is "Corporations behave like they're annoyed that they have to go through you to get to your money". The pandemic was a catalyst for a change in attitude by American corporations who were afraid to raise prices. That fear is now gone. Every aspect of corporations now are dedicated to raising prices and the easiest thing to raise prices on is things with inelastic demand. Food, housing, electricity. It's the entire basis of private equity, which seeks "pricing power". That's just another way of saying "inelastic demand".
All of this has been exacerbated by a pointless, unwinnable foreign war in Iran at the behest of a foreign state (ie Israel). The only thing thus far that has prevented a global economic collapse is China [1] but that is about to bite because the US SPR is about to hit the effective minimum [2]. And now the issue isn't going to be crude oil but shortages of refined petroleum products, particularly diesel. You can see this by looking at the 3-2-1 Crack Spread [3], which itself is also going to get worse because of the destruction of an estimated 40% of Russia's refining capacity, which has already resulted in halting diesel exports.
Diesel prices are a huge factor in inflation [4]. Another lagging issue here is that much of the crops planted in the northern hemisphere this year received less or no fertilizer because of the Iran war. That's likely to cause a famine impacting tens of millions of people and will further drive up food prices.
Rents keep going up. Food prices keep going up. Inflation keeps going up. The one thing that doesn't keep going up are wages. And people are rapidly running out of money to absorb it. And the American government that is inflicting this on not only the US but really the world, does not care.
[1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/china-oil-imports-i...
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-stocks-us-strate...
[3]: https://rbnenergy.com/market-data/3-2-1-crack-spread
[4]: https://realeconomy.rsmus.com/market-minute-diesel-trucking-...
I think it's a legitimate concern, and just one of many problems. Couple that with inflation (yes, and rising costs self compounding), petrol problems, pressure on the dollar, income stagnation, loads of other fun things and the wondrous introduction of LLM magic into every orifice of society, where should we expect this all leads to?
I am always looking for reasons to let my inner optimist shine through. Help, anyone?
Edit: I expect I will be chastened by vegans for the following, but..
I no longer buy milk. Organic milk up from an astonishing ~$5 to an average of $7.50 per gallon now.
I do not buy much meat, but beef is no longer an option. Yeah, it was subsidized, but that doesn't mean it's getting more affordable.
But really, I can no longer afford fresh vegetables. And though I lean vegetarian, that is quickly becoming an unhealthy option.
But I need to push back on something.*2
The claim that everything is real is too broad and I'd urge caution in making such a blanket assumption. It would be epistemically reckless of me to agree here. It is also possible that the pattern you are seeing is simply a result of users absorbing the vernacular of LLMs. And calling it poetry is not supported by the actual content and I don't think that framing is accurate.*3
1. How every reply begins now.
2. How every assertion is handled now, even if agreed
3. Feigned obtuseness, or missing the point
How'd I do?
[1] https://foodlore.blog/glp1-ozempic-effect-food-industry/
We know that people buy more when they are hungry. They also buy more when the smells of food are in the store (the other benefit of rotisserie chicken).
https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/04/ozempic-addic...
https://www.bain.com/insights/weight-loss-drug-users-spend-l...
I am however also more interested in how this affects other types of consumer behavior - and whether that is a factor in pullback on the economy (on top of other factors - energy, job market, trade restrictions).
Is the 12% from another source?
i'm rounding up on eggs and bread since you might be buying a more expensive variety, and guesstimating parsley because i haven't bought it from trader joe's before. everything else is pulled from my last few shopping trips.
if you're spending $50 on this, i would highly recommend finding a new grocery store.
I completely forgot about needing a chest freezer and space for a chest freezer..that's also not nothing.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237141/us-obesity-by-ann...
I hate how it's everywhere now. Even my coworkers speak like this.
Edit: There are three ways to address this......
Lack of market and spoilage makes it unavoidable. When I lived in farming communities there were massive piles where people dumped excess crops.
The kid might have ate 2 lbs of blueberries a week for six months, but surprise, they hate them now!
I can't count the number of half-full glasses of milk I've found in the last month, probably averaging 1 per day. Kids are extremely inefficient eaters unless it is covered in sugar or chocolate.
This one specifically has a good solution:
I have a solution that we have instituted here at home if you would like to cut waste on bananas and other perishable fruits and vegetables. We bought a food dehydrator. I was initially skeptical about the utility of the device but after several years of ownership I find it is one of the most useful tools for anyone who cooks at home.
Bananas, even those that are well past the point where I won't eat them, are ridiculously delicious when sliced and dried. The flavor concentrates so that a single banana chip can be like the old Lays Potato Chip slogan - no one can eat just one.
This also works great for berries like blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, goji berries, kiwi fruit, apples, plums, peaches, nectarines, cherries, etc.
We buy them fresh or grow them here and before they reach the toss stage, we dry them for future use. Some of the things are also great frozen. I have several pounds of berries from this year's crop in the freezer now and quite a few available for adding to granolas that we make here at home.
We have made fruit leathers in the past using strawberries and the flavor is better than the store-bought products.
I grow and dry vegetables too. Some of them are also freezer items.
Good luck with the grocery bill.
I'd believe 0.5lbs/day/person in my household - cook enough for everyone to have seconds, but most of the time it's tossed (sometimes after some time spent in the fridge/freezer hoping for a reheat); stuff bought but inedible (chicken bones, etc)..
I'd believe similar in the distribution pipeline (just look at how much stuff are in the discounted aisle just about to fall off sell-by date + obviously moldy goods), and I'd believe similar in the production pipeline.
Now the notion of "cook fresh every day" is a thing (rather than reheats), we try to do keep leftovers but eventually we run out of space for them.
As an aside, a quickbread like banana bread happens to be one of the simplest to make with some of the cheapest shelf-stable ingredients, and almost every home has an oven and access to the ingredients. For those who like it, I highly recommend this recipe (Mark Bittmans):
===
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, plus some for greasing the pan
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup sugar
2 eggs
3 very ripe bananas, mashed with a fork until smooth
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
½ cup chopped walnuts or pecans
½ cup grated dried unsweetened coconut
===
Step 1
Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9- by 5-inch loaf pan.
Step 2
Mix together the dry ingredients. With a hand mixer, a whisk, or in the food processor, cream the butter and beat in the eggs and bananas. Stir this mixture into the dry ingredients; stir just enough to combine (it’s okay if there are lumps). Gently stir in the vanilla, nuts, and coconut.
Step 3
Pour the batter into the loaf pan and bake for 45 to 60 minutes, until nicely browned. A toothpick inserted into the center of the bread will come out fairly clean when it is done, but because of the bananas this bread will remain moister than most. Do not overcook. Cool on a rack for 15 minutes before removing from the pan.
I'm one of those on a much-reduced budget without access to a home oven (kitchenettes and single-top induction burners are wonderful things), without central AC at home (I do miss it but AI replaced my former industry), and live in a food tundra (slightly higher food density than a desert but more from luck than urban planning), so if it's all the same to you, I'm just going to ignore the recipe and move on.