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Comment by Izkata | Hacker News Reader

Here's another then: I'm one person with no pets who has spent an average of $430 per month at the grocery store in 2023. And almost all of that is food, I get most non-food consumables from Amazon subscriptions.

In 2019 it was around $250 per month. Pretty much the same set of items.

(This is in Chicago)

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We also make a high enough income where we don’t really think much at all about grocery prices but have no issue spending way below $200 a month without thinking about it. This is why I am confused by these stories. Sure I grab the thing on sale instead of the expensive thing when I notice but it doesn’t seem that hard to stay under $200 a person.

How are you defining groceries here? I suspect that some people are being fairly expansive and including everything that they'd buy at a grocery store, while others are being much more restrictive. Using a more expansive definition (mostly because I've literally broken things down by items), we're close to $500 per person, the few times I've spot-checked our spending. I think it's difficult to be well-below $200 per person without being highly budget-conscious, avoiding expensive categories altogether and/or eating out all the time.

So prices went up and you didn’t change what you get? I guess people are much less price elastic than I am. We are well under $200 a month and I don’t feel like we do anything special to keep our costs down.

I usually don't add to these conversations because my salary is high enough I don't need to pay attention and people love jumping on that. But I think here it ends up with a good comparison point.

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