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