The US grocery slowdown is real | Hacker News Reader

The US grocery slowdown is real

bain.com

87 pointstoomuchtodo140 comments

They should just lead with people don't have any money to buy things because wages aren't increasing to match living expenses.

It cuts back some of the fig leaves

Probably cuts back on some of the epic waste on the consumer side. Hope that ripples to cutting down waste throughout the system. Paying for stuff that isn't consumed is by definition waste.

Consumers are the last group I would blame.

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.

1.5lb / day? I'd wager it's quite equally in thirds, would love to see the data.

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.

No food gets thrown out in my house. We have trash from plastic and paper but food is consumed, by somebody. If it hits the expiration date then it’s today’s quick meal or dog food. I try not to throw away anything that is edible.

Or composted to feed my garden. I hardly throw out any garbage.

Probably was that way before we got married and had a kid. And before our dog started getting older and we needed to watch what she eats.

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.

absolutely. Cooking smaller meals for the family to ensure it's all eaten or having no-cook alternatives for afterwards (hello graham crackers!) if you're still hungry. Normally I try my best to portion for who's going to eat. If I'm cooking for myself, its usually a one-pan meal.

That "waste" is almost certainly excess production that can't find a market + spoilage. It is entirely normal for farmers to literally dump their crops in these cases. Everyone in the supply chain does it to some extent.

Lack of market and spoilage makes it unavoidable. When I lived in farming communities there were massive piles where people dumped excess crops.

When I got married our food waste probably tripled. My food waste as a single guy was significantly less than married. When I had kids it probably tripled again. Much like a horse to water, you cannot explain to a 3 year old that if they don't eat all the banannas before tomorrow, they will go bad. We probably throw out 1-2 lbs of fruit a week, which is ~100 lbs a year right there.

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.

Buy frozen fruit?

>they don't eat all the banannas before tomorrow, they will go bad

This one specifically has a good solution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_bread

The missing datapoint is that households are having to work more labor-hours per banana every year for decades, so the energy necessary to cook banana bread is in direct competition with the energy necessary to purchase bananas. Atomic Era assumptions that a household has the time, energy, capability, appliances, and electricity budget to cook banana bread no longer reliably hold in the U.S. and cannot be taken for granted as accessible to all families. (If this seems like a negative feedback loop, it is; see also food deserts, substitution of Added Sugars for more expensive-but-nutritional calories in the diets of our majority-obese population, and so on.)

If the point is that cost/calorie has risen too much, it's substantially worse in the cost/calorie sense to eat prepared food out of the home versus cook at home.

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.

Worse in the raw cash outlay per food calorie, maybe, but you also have to adjust for food deserts — ancillary costs to acquire groceries @ IRS rate of $0.725/mile, nearest grocery store is 1.5 miles away, which doesn't sound like a lot but it sure does add up! — energy budget decisions for 15 minutes of food preparation vs. 15 minutes of extra study/rest/sleep, heat output of one hour of oven vs. lack of air conditioning at home during extended multi-week summer heat waves, and so on.

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.

I have two kids and this is pure bollox. They'll eat what they are given if they are hungry enough. Or eat the leftovers yourself. Cook the fruit and make compote. We never throw out edible food, virtually zero waste. Just make an effort.

Same here, 3 kids, we don’t waste food. As an aside, we’re all slender. We just figured out how much of what to buy each week, plan our meals, etc. I also personally like eating leftovers for both breakfast and a packed lunch, which probably helps a bit.

> I also personally like eating leftovers for both breakfast and a packed lunch, which probably helps a bit.

That definitely helps, I'm pretty bad at eating leftovers unless I put them in a new meal so we end up with more food waste than necessary.

Kids completely changing what they'll eat on a weekly basis also has a pretty large impact.

Kids are difficult, I can attest to that. Realizing you’re not feeding your kids poison because you’re eating the same meal, is also a difficult realization.

I see nightmare kids via friends/neighbors, and all I can think is “stop treating your kids like they’re your coworkers, they’re your kids and they actually yearn for structure and ‘discipline’ in the sense that you are their whole worldview structure”

Kids want structure, rules, boundaries. They will test them, which is good.

> Kids want structure, rules, boundaries. They will test them, which is good.

Oh yeah, totally. That being said, our eldest was super picky and changeable (and often didn't eat enough so it was a little concerning) so we often ended up with lots of staples that she one day decided she didn't like :shrug:

Mostly fixed now that she's older, but I can see how food waste happens. And more generally, if the kids get excited or distracted, there will often be waste.

You are the outlier then, the situation described was spot on for all the parents I know.

I think if you take a global outlook, you'll find I am not the outlier. Wasting food is a recent Western phenomenon.

Is this like the famous "my dog will only eat fresh roasted chicken" you hear from certain kinds of owners? Because I'm pretty sure when a kid is hungry enough they will eat a banana.

Source: grew up poor, there was no food waste, none

Ripes bananas makes the best cakes or pancakes ! I got your point though.

I'm a person who will definitely not eat a banana that is past its prime. I completely understand the option to just throw it out since bananas are inexpensive and widely available.

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.

They should just lead with saying that obesity rates have tripled since the 1960s and maybe they will start declining a bit now.

Very well-supported argument by the fact that obesity tends to accumulate in the well-off who can afford lots of food, while poor folks tend to be slender. So yeah, clearly lower spending on food would reduce obesity.

Obesity is inversely correlated with income.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/237141/us-obesity-by-ann...

Correct.

i think they were being sarcastic with a very valid point ;)

Cheap GLP-1's will probably finally bend this curve for lower incomes. Muscle-mass (via paid meds) will be the new marker of wealth/status for upper incomes.

Meat is like $30/lb. What a joke, I see almost no one at the butcher counter in grocery stores anymore.

One of the most common interactions I witness at our local supermarket butcher counter is the guy explaining to yet another customer that the advertised weekly special sold out before lunch a couple days prior.

AFAIU, when beef prices started to spike a year or two ago, ranchers decided to cash in and slaughter much of their herd, including breeding stock. This was on top of a decades-long decline in herd size, and a recent drought that has driven up costs of maintaining a herd--another reason why they decided to cull and cash-in.

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.

There's also a screwworm outbreak going on.

We buy a side of beef at a time from a farm down the street for $6/lb, up from $4 a few years ago. Can’t buy beef any other way.

$7.35/lb where I am with a $600 deposit. It ends up being about $2k all things considered. It may even out, but a lot of folks don't have that kind of money around, ~5% of a yearly salary isn't nothing for a lot of people.

I completely forgot about needing a chest freezer and space for a chest freezer..that's also not nothing.

That’s before or after trimming? Because you could do crazy arbitrage at those prices. I get trimmed beef for $14/lb at the farm down the street.

I believe that’s hanging weight, so after the butcher it’s probably closer to $9, but still a bargain and a half compared to what I see at wal mart, which is the only place we buy groceries because of cost.

>Meat is like $30/lb.

???

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

https://www.kroger.com/weeklyad

Yeah my local Safeway has been having whole chickens, leg quarters, thighs or drumsticks for 0.99 per pound. Still that price as of today.

> 1. beef for $6.97/lb

You'll want to specify what type of beef. The price per pound varies immensely based upon what cut you're getting.

$6.97/lb is a price I can only assume refers to ground beef. Once you start talking about steaks, though, the price climbs rather quickly. Near me, sirloin regularly clocks between $14-16/lb, and NY strip/ribeye at the best of times may go on sale for close to $20/lb, but they also regularly exceed $30/lb.

I get ribeye pretty regularly for $10/lb on sale in South Carolina. But, yeah. Normally it’s $15/lb here. Not something I’d be eating regularly.

This is much more likely due to competition from food delivery services. Spend on which has shot up dramatically because at least in the United States average incomes have actually risen substantially since 2015.

Everything costs too much. I went to the grocery store yesterday I spent $50 to get a packet of bread, a dozen eggs, two yogurts, two yellow onions, a jalapeno, two tomatoes and a bunch of parsley. This covers breakfast for 2 days for my partner and I. In 2022, $150 would fetch the entire week’s groceries for the two of us. We are paying more, while having to change what we eat with cheaper/unhealthier options. Otherwise we would be spending almost $1500/month on just groceries for 2.

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 are you located? I think even NYCs groceries are not that expensive.

SF Bay Area. I will say that these are not Costco prices or a store where I’d be couponing, but it’s not Whole Foods either. I would love to go to Costco but unfortunately I do not have the space to accommodate the bulk quantities that I’d have to buy and consume.

hi! i live in SF. at trader joe's, these items would be priced at - $5 (bread loaf) + $5 (eggs) + $3 (yogurt) + $2 (onions) + $2 (tomatoes) + $1 (jalapeno) + $3 (parsley) = $21.

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.

It seems inflated roughly 40% to prove a point but regardless stuff is still too expensive and I don’t eat meat. Don’t know though yesterday was reading some comments here about people literally saying “$50k income a month in SF and you still can’t buy a house,” stuff like that is ridiculously out of touch.

I don’t have a Trader Joe’s around me. Sure I drive 20 mins away to one and then spend another hour going to a different place to shop for all the things Trader Joe’s doesn’t have, then yeah I could get things for cheaper. But that’s the point. You didn't need to do this a few years ago and now you do.

Yeah, I'm in my 40s and I never understood why people hated inflation so much until 2021/22. I get it now, it's massively disruptive and annoying.

$5 a loaf of bread is truly diabolical.

juat wait until you hear the costs of gluten-free bread

>> Chooses to live in one of the highest cost of living, most expensive areas in the entire country

>> Complains that groceries are expensive

Bay Area was the highest cost of living areas in 2022 as well. You seemed to have missed the point.

I feel like some of that is maybe shopping at the wrong place. Which the article I guess covers by saying people are addressing by changing retailers to save money.

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.

When you have to start shopping down market because you can't afford your normal store that is an indicator that you have less buying power now.

Saying 'everything is fine, you just have to shop down market, you can no longer afford your normal store, you need to go to the poorest store now because you are poor now' is just rephrasing what is being said.

I don’t have Walmart to go to but I do have a Costco. But like I mentioned in a different comment, I can’t do normal groceries there because of the space I have + how much I can consume before it all goes bad. I still shop for a lot of things at Costco, but the point I was trying to make was comparing my same exact situation from 4 years ago to today.

The article points to shopping around and buying cheaper brands to make it work. But that’s the point, you didn’t have to do it, but now you do because things are too expensive.

You can get items at Costco that you do not need a lot of room for. Plus, you can meal prep and save time and money. It should not cost you $1500 per month to eat healthy food.

Again the point isn’t that there is a pathway to healthy and cheap food. The point is how much you have to do to get there. A few years ago you could shop at a single store and not meal prep to achieve that, now you do.

> Where I am in the US, you can get a dozen eggs for ~$2 at Walmart.

Some people prefer to shop at less conglomerate and evil stores.

It also depends on what sort of stuff you're buying. For example here (non-US) the cheapest white bread is USD1.20, but you can bet that's the worst, most unhealthy garbage they can make. Something with high fibre is more like twice that.

I think the point is that everything got more expensive, everywhere. How much were these eggs at Walmart in the beginning of 2020?

A dozen of eggs at Aldi's in FL was $0.79 in 2020. Now around $3.00.

Farmed salmon was commonly $8.99 at Costco, now it's $12.99 (sometimes on sale for $9.99).

On the topic of shopping at the wrong place, in Australia we have a supermarket duopoly. Depending on where you live, you may only have the choice of Coles or Woolworths. They both suck. I'm lucky to live in the inner city and can shop at aldi or the local markets. People living in regional towns have less choice and are getting screwed over.

I'm in Europe. I have been tracking my all expenses to the cent religiously since 2010 in Excel sheets. I also haven't changed my grocery habits much since around 2020, except very recently when I actually started looking at the deals (discounts) and buying more generic stuff. We haven't been eating out much (~5 times per month on average) Obviously, it varies month-by-month but my family's (2 adults, not counting the child) expenses on food have risen by around 100% since 2022.

Where?

At least where I live if I went to Kroger I’d spend $6 on bread, two tubs of Fage would be $14, eggs are like $3, the parsley would be like $1.50 and the rest of the veggies comes out to about $5.

And how much did that cost in 2022?

Fage and parsley are up substantially since 2020. The rest has been pretty stable, at least near me.

I can’t edit the comment but I think people have a reactionary response to this comment, and are comparing grocery prices at the cheapest store available to them.

The comment was meant as a comparison to the same store prices in 2022. If your argument is that “Walmart is cheaper, shop there”, how much more expensive is Walmart as compared to 2022? If your argument is that “don’t buy everything at the same store or buy cheaper brands”, is that something you had to do before or is that your response to raised prices. If your argument is “well you live in an expensive, I don’t”, has your grocery bill remained the same as compared to your income from a few years ago (you could’ve gotten a promotion or a new job, but that’s not the point).

Also keep in mind, shop at XYZ is not really a great way to think about this because not everyone has access to the same stores.

By living expenses, you mean rent. You should just say rent. It cuts back on another fig leaf.

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.

We seemingly have very different experiences with rent. All rent I've paid was agreed upon prior to me being charged it, and guns were never involved. The people I rented from did the work of owning/managing the building and providing it for my use. Maybe this isn't a noble way to earn money, but I found it to be a really useful service, and it seems not dramatically different than most services I pay for (how much incremental work is Netflix doing for my behalf? what work is the bank doing to earn my loan?).

Some people think society owes them.

Yes, society owes a social contract where if you work you can afford to live and have a roof over your head, food to eat, and clothes that aren't Temu plastic rags of worse quality than dystopian sci-fi fiction 'clothes issued to people on basic'.

That's so true - the land-owning class believe that society should continue paying them lots of money if that land is to be put to use. Don't get me started on landlords and their passive income requirements.

Indentured servants agreed to be indentured servants. At gunpoint. It's literally illegal not to pay rent. They will put you in jail if you don't sign a rental contract. Consent under duress is not consent.

This is hyperbolicly dramatic. Nobody will put you in jail of you don't sign a contract. And if you don't pay rent it's a beach of contract and civil matter. It can be very hard to force people to pay rent if they're not paying. All you can do is kick them out, eventually ,there is no jail.

Your dramatic post makes it seem like the cops can kick down your door to get rent. That's simply not true.

But it is true, from a certain perspective.

You're either homeless or you have a domicile somehow. So, many people enter into leases or rental agreements. Then they pay rent to maintain that home.

If you don't pay rent, you don't get arrested, but the constable is actually a law enforcement officer, and the constable is the #1 official who is involved in evictions, so yes, they will "kick down your door" to dislodge you from a place where you haven't paid rent.

And then what do you do, when you're homeless and on the streets? In most urban centers, it's illegal to sleep outdoors or trespass ("urban camping" laws), and so the homeless are often subject to arrest or sanctions because of the nature of their plight.

So the only logical response here is to get housed, pay rent, and keep paying, just to stay on the legal side of things. Ask me how I know.

It isn't dramatic. If you don't pay rent you're homeless. It's illegal to be homeless. So you go to jail.

Walmart groceries have also gotten more expensive and Walmart owns the land that the vast majority of its stores are on.

Have you ever owned a building? It's kind of a huge pain in the ass to maintain. A huger pain in the ass to improve it. I wouldn't do it for free.

The article is from Bain Capital. Of course they're going to ignore the obvious reason and blame something else. They raised prices more than people are willing to pay. Unlimited profit growth can't exist.

Bain Capital and Bain & Co. are separate, but what's interesting is that the former was spun off from the latter in 1984 as a way to apply and profit from the learned business juice (i.e., wisdom?) of the Harvard & Wharton MBAs that they hire.

Can't ignore the GLP-1 choice though. If a customer spends, say $200 month on a GLP-1, and saves that much by not buying groceries, that also results in a grocery slow down.

I really can’t imagine that matters at the scale of data we’re talking about here. If you can’t afford groceries, you certainly can’t afford bleeding-edge vanity drugs.

It's definitely a reported phenomenon that glp-1 inhibitors are crashing junk food sales. They're also not bleeding edge vanity drugs. Something like a third of Americans are on a glp-1 inhibitor and they're well covered by insurance.

Wages is one thing. Our sitting president inacting vast amounts of tariffs and other asinine decisions is another thing and is the reason why no one has even less money these days. Ever since he took office, my available funds have dwindled drastically despite reductions in spending and increases in salary.

I'm not surprised. K shaped economy, any sector that isn't high tech / AI is stagnant. It's rough out there. I've been saying since Covid, retailers have figured out some consumers aren't as price sensitive as previously thought. WholeFoods doesn't need to cut prices, but the lower tier grocery stores will really feel the cutbacks.

In NYC Amazon fresh is cheaper than most of the grocery stores, except maybe some things like frozen food in Trader Joe.

We simply stopped buying food in the grocery store across the street: Amazon fresh on many positions can be like 50% cheaper.

Mr Bezos thanks you for your support and sends his regards.

Who cares? I prefer to spend way less and get better quality product than in our local supermarket. If you have a bough money to overpay because you do not want to “pay Bezos” — be my guest.

> Our analysis of NielsenIQ grocery data shows a trend in negative unit growth starting in mid-2025, masked by steady price increases. But since February 2026, units have stepped down sharply enough to pull sales lower across the US. Prices are still climbing 2% to 3% year over year,

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.

Yeah it's real rocket science at work here. Grocery bill keeps going up and less and lower quality food comes home. It's a real mystery.

Not sure a cut of $186m between 2025 and 2034 warrants the cavalier description -- "benefits were scaled back" -- of changes to SNAP in the BBB.

In the immediate term, "Approximately 4 million people in a typical month will lose some or all of their SNAP food benefits once the changes are fully implemented, based on Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates." according to the Center on Policy and Budget Priorities. [1] I'm not sure what is going to happen in my community (rural Virginia with a good portion of federal and federal-adjacent retirees living here full-time) as people continue to be kicked off SNAP. Food pantries are serving more people than at the beginning of 2025. I've not investigated the status of donations. But anecdotally, friends are giving fewer food items to emergency pantries.

But as is the case with other aid programs, there is a public benefit to public benefits: "Here’s the remarkable thing about SNAP: it’s one of the highest return investments the government makes. According to USDA Economic Research Service data, every $1 in SNAP benefits generates approximately $1.50 to $1.80 in economic activity. During the Great Recession, that multiplier reached $1.84." The question is, with the reduction in people served coupled with work requirements, will the follow-on economic benefits be realized between now and 2034? How will low-income households fare?

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/many-low-incom... [2] https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/the-hidden-economic-engin...

What is interesting is the subnational breakdown - volumes have been decreasing in the US West for over a year compared to the rest of the US, and overall sales have also decreased as well whereas they are stagnant in the rest of the US.

Drought? Less local farming?

Consumers have been optimizing for convenience over being value shoppers.

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.

> 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.

Although we are right in the middle of a cyclospora outbreak.

Theoretically I'm kinda rich, but I feel the crunch at the grocery store.

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

BTW my nearest grocery shut down this quarter. Couldn't make money. Got to go farther now.

Shelves are fairly spotty in my town. Never saw that before, not in 50 years.

Is delivery services accounted for? I buy 1/3 I did a year ago, as Amazon's services are so convenient, and not much more expensive. (Especially since I throw out less now)

No way to know what data sources NielsenIQ is using, but for what it lacks in data from retailers, it probably makes up for by way of consumers' receipts.

People underestimate the impact of glp1 drugs on this. They should also correlate with decline in fast food consumption.

I don't know how to estimate the impact tbh. The same article links to https://www.bain.com/insights/weight-loss-drug-users-spend-l...

How much does 7% of the population spending 4% less on groceries impact the numbers in the original article?

I think that is also big factor why many, very many, products contain now protein, and the exessive protein food receipes on social media.

I don’t think a large percentage of the American population is paying $500/month for glp1.

I doubt it. I'd wager the opposite: we like to overestimate the most interesting explanations vs. the boring ones.

My sedentary, calorie dense, UberEats-at-2am 5000 calorie lifestyle isn't why I'm fat -- it's the "seed oils".

The variation in prices of staple foods between different stores has exploded in Chicago. For what it's worth, Aldi is significantly cheaper for many items. It's gotten a lot busier there too.

I'm just one small data point, and significantly in the minority I'm sure, but I got chickens and started gardening hard 4 or 5 years ago and get around 1/3 of my food from there.

I suspect the Organic foods market will keep growing. Moreover, various Organic foods are routinely out of stock, suggesting a high demand to supply ratio.

cooking one or two portions at home using quality ingredients from stores in SF is literally as pricey as eating out nowadays.

doesn't surprise me that people are trying to get their dollars to stretch further by buying in bulk, planning ahead more consciously, etc.

Every corner of your life where you think you are safe, stable, and able to save will be found and min/maxed for ultimate profits.

Honestly, it's always been that way for a lot of things. Ten years ago I remember trying to make the ultimate home pizza, spent over $30 in ingredients and realized it's cheaper to buy out. Same with hamburgers - unless you can use all of the ingredients to make 5 or 6.

Restaurants have always been rather low margin, and they're buying ingredients a heckofa lot cheaper than a single shopper can.

Costco rotisserie chicken at $5.99. I know it's their door buster, but since they won't increase prices on principle, it's the least expensive protein in town, delicious too.

Try to make one yourself for $5.99 when just a pound of chicken thighs at the same store is $3/lbs.

People are broke and on GLP1s

The 18-month data charts in TFA don't give much information for comparing "this" with the past. I wish it went back 30 or 50 years. I like that the default view is units sold, looks like 2026 is a worse year for grocery stores compared with last year. Sales dollars is still growing, though slower that it grew in the past, and apparently only by jacking up prices.

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

Is the whole Straight of Hormuz fertilizer shortage just FUD, or should we be preparing to see this "real"ness get a lot more real in the coming months or season?

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.

Journalist Alfred Henry Lewis said over a century ago that civilization is only 9 meals away from anarchy. I fear in the coming years we are going to be testing that theory.

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-...

Imagine how expensive it’s going to be for the world to help Russia if it collapses.

Depends. Russia has a lot of natural resources and some good land. I imagine the world will take its cut as a return on whatever help we render.

Best alternatives to negotiated agreement have been notoriously atrocious with that country/society/culture. Sadly, I expect scorched earth will be the Nash equilibrium.

Trump put a little orange thumb on the scale by choosing Walmart to be the winner on beef prices. Did they weigh for government interference?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/grocery/2026/07/08/walmart-ro...

From your own article:

>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".

Yeah this is just trump taking credit for something that was already planned.

Obesity rates have been declining over the same time period.

Ozempic drops grocery purchases by about 5%.[1]

[1] https://foodlore.blog/glp1-ozempic-effect-food-industry/

Or.. is it a GLP-1 byproduct? These are powerful appetite suppressants.. in fact I'm curious if the mechanism of action of these peptides affects other impulse behavior, including impulse purchasing?

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).

"Early studies suggest that GLP-1s may be effective in treating opioid, alcohol and nicotine addiction. Researchers are examining whether the drugs can also help people who are addicted to gambling, sex and shopping, among other things."

https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/04/ozempic-addic...

Yeah - powerful confounder to all the analyses of customer behavior. Even the article itself calls it out - there probably is a good way to segment it, as GLP1 availability is not uniform, some states regulate it more tightly etc.

The only state regulations I can find are whether their state insurance plans cover them.

12% of the adult population. I think it's a good theory.

> In the US today, about 15% of adults have tried GLP-1s, with 7% currently taking them, according to research based on Bain’s proprietary GLP-1 adoption model.

Is the 12% from another source?

I got it from this RAND survey. https://glp1newsnow.substack.com/p/how-many-americans-are-ac...

The analysis mentions this, says it's a factor and links to:

https://www.bain.com/insights/weight-loss-drug-users-spend-l...

It certainly does, I mentioned it in an comment below, good callout.

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).

I am inclined towards thinking that it is probably this as there is also decline in fast food demand.

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