Americans are spending the biggest share of their income on food in 3 decades | Hacker News Reader

Americans are spending the biggest share of their income on food in 3 decades

cbsnews.com

35 pointspaulpauper23 comments

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They really should have a breakdown between restaurant and grocery spending.

EDIT: They do have it in one of the article links.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

The increase is mostly in food away from home.

Like this one? https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery...

I don't know why this topic has so much suction on HN. Anything that has a whiff of "shadow stats" inflation trutherism goes right to the top.

If regular at-home food actually was starting to eat up a lot more income, that would be an interesting discussion and a significant change for our society (as that has been trending down for a while). So I get why that would be interesting.

But the article doesn't differentiate between those, only the linked source.

Because those charts don’t line up with the average person’s lived experience. Even well paid tech pros on this forum are noticing it.

I cooked some steaks for Valentine’s Day. Cheapest ones I could find were $15/ea. 2 years ago I cooked steaks for Valentines Day and they were like 8 bucks.

Maybe overall in aggregate there’s one metric but when you notice a lot of stuff at the grocery store has DOUBLED in price in just a few years, it’s concerning.

also that chart stops in 2022 and there is still a noticiable uptick despite the very long scale.

The claim that retail steak prices have doubled in 2 years is exactly the kind of inexplicable silliness to which I referred.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000703613#0

It's somewhat understandable considering the rising minimum wages for restaurant staff and the additional fees restaurants impose for employee benefits, which have been implemented in several major cities.

Yeah the data and the average persons lived experience seems to vary wildly though.

I found a handful of receipts recently from 2020 or so and some of the items are really surprising.

A bag of Doritos is 7 bucks now. Nearly doubled.

A random grocery stop after work for dinner ingredients like produce, shelf staples etc, yeah that was about 30-40 now I expect to spend 60 or more.

Then, like, spray paint for instance is a wild one. It went from about $4 to about $8 now.

Worth noting… somehow La Croix hasn’t really gone up at all. Which is great because I drink it like it’s water.

Americans are spending the biggest share of their income on everything. If you haven't noticed, salaries haven't gone up in the past decade but housing prices have doubled. So has everything else.

I can't afford my ADHD medication because having somewhere to live is more important, and having something to eat takes up the rest of the family budget. We end each week with $0 in the bank.

Looking for a software development job but it definitely isn't easy.

Wage growth has outpaced inflation for the last 11 months.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1351276/wage-growth-vs-i...

10 years isn't 11 months. ZIRP and a bunch of other stuff happened in between the two.

For 9 out of 10 years wage growth out paced inflation.

1) CPI is busted and understates inflation.

2) Wage growth measures are busted because they a) conflate the massive growth of top quartile incomes with with the stagnation, in real terms, of wages of the median and lower earner, and b) generally start well into the collapse of middle-class real income (and, covering the last decade, show the "growth" of the post-GFC recovery), and so don't capture the size of the hole the majority of America is digging itself out of.

More like digging itself deeper into. While the rich get richer.

In NZL I pay $5nzd for 3 months? I’m On 30mg Ritalin instant a day. One doctors check up every 3 months. No health system is over loaded I have to book 2 weeks in advance.

As for the food. Pistachio nuts are expensive. These trade restrictions on Iran are annoying as I have to pay $30nzd a kg of pistachio nuts. Angus steak is also expensive

That's definitely part of America

Here it costs me $50 for two weeks. I'm supposed to be on 30mg dexedrine a day.

I'm starting to notice the opposite of price inflation - I see more and more sales and bogo or buy-2-get-4 shenanigans. Brands trying to get consumers to buy certain products again without actually lowering the sticker price, probably in the hopes that it sticks.

I am sure the price hikes have had an impact on sales, maybe there was a slight delay in consumer adaptation and that's why hiking and more seemed like a good idea (short-term).

I wonder if the large brands have psychologists on staff coming up with the best strategies to make high prices stick long-term without too much short-term impact.

I remember heated discussions here on hn of people noticing rising grocery bills. There were people who always bought the same thing and noticing their costs jumping 20%. And throngs of people came in gaslighting them and using all sorts of wrinkly brain arguments.

Like these poor people somehow shouldn't be believing their own eyes.

For a site that is all about the cutting edge and discussing trends that period right before the inflation surge made me realize just because people throw around fancy jargon and charts doesn't mean anything

There's a Matrix quote that fits in here. Something about reliance on the system.

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39454268

What's weird is in my town prices skyrocketed at the Safeway but stayed low at the WinCo.

Does anyone remember the 90s being a period of high food prices? I don't.

Or once you factor out restaurants, the 2010s.

I am just going to say this... hear me up: guinea pig farming. Less land, fast growth.

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