The U.S. grocery slowdown is becoming harder to ignore.
Shoppers are buying fewer items than a year ago, and grocery sales are declining as weakening unit sales are now outweighing rising prices. That is according to new analysis from Bain & Company using NielsenIQ grocery data shared exclusively with CNBC.
Grocery units, which refer to individual items or products sold, fell 1.8% in June from a year earlier, a sharp reversal from the 0.1% year-over-year growth recorded in June 2025. While prices continue to rise about 2% to 3% year-over-year, that inflation cushion for the industry is no longer enough to keep overall sales growing.
This is because of all the people who just got kicked off food stamps because of the big beautiful bill
Probably has a lot to do with it. A friend says his retired, low income parents had their SNAP benefits cut from $300 / months to $30.
thats not even the worst part, peoples preniums on thier aca plans became unaffordable, although there doesnt seem to be that many using ACA marketplace.
there doesnt seem to be that many using ACA marketplace.
I went two years after I got laid off in 2019 having to pay for private health insurance. I got one of those ridiculous catastrophe-only policies with like a $7000 annual deductible and was still paying about $400 a month. I priced policies on the ACA marketplace, with the same shitty deductibles but three times the premium as what I was paying. I just don’t get why anyone would buy insurance there. Maybe the ACA policies are more likely to actually pay out in case of illness, I dunno.
One difference I know is the fact is that my private insurance did not allow me to get out of the mandated fine you supposedly had to pay if you didn’t have coverage, whereas the ACA policies do get you out of the fine. But for whatever reason, I never had to pay that fine.
Well I’m sure that has a lot to do with it, I would expect it’s simply also just due to the massively inflated prices of many foods and the massively increasing costs of other standard expenses like rent
Have they tried paying people more?
There will literally pay private armies to start killing us before they would pay us a dollar more per hour.
Sorry, no…Best we can do is charge you more for groceries, gas, and basic necessities.
And americans will still do nothing about it, just accept it as a new status quo and complain a bit online.
And how many shitty fast food chains have gone broke? People are still wasting money there.
It’s becoming harder to ignore the prices are higher and quality is worse than ever
Hey, don’t forget about quantity! Cereal boxes are so thin that they can’t stand up on their own anymore, old recipes don’t work anymore because cans are too small, and pretty much every non-food item has gotten 25% smaller or more.
The cereal boxes are just awful I was stocking grocery for a while and you had to rely on tricks of physics to get those boxes fully stocked on the shelf lol. Just more proof they don’t think about anyone down the line when they design stuff anymore
Companies should have thought of the repercussions before shoveling cash into fascism.
When your entire focus is one fiscal quarter long, you never think of the long term repercussions of your choices.
We have scaled back significantly on our grocery purchases within the past month. No snacks, only stuff that’s on sale, beef products very rarely (because it’s fucking expensive now) and fewer items overall. Even after all that it comes to around $80 per trip. But we are now losing money due to our power and water bills getting jacked up so we are looking into cutting back even more.
beef products very rarely (because it’s fucking expensive now)
I was in Acme a few days ago looking through the steak section. There was a porterhouse close to expiration on sale for … $54 fucking dollars. It was a little over one pound. I’d be astonished to pay that much for a steak at a fucking steakhouse, cooked and brought to my table with sides and drinks.
If I want the taste of steak these days, I buy bottom round and flatten the shit out of it with a tenderizing mallet.
My husband wanted a special German stew this week and I went to price out chuck roast for it and it was $10/lb! It would cost us $20 in meat to make a pot of simple freakin stew. Round wasn’t even cheaper either! I quickly decided we weren’t having that stew right now. The price of beef is insane. Beef roast and stew was the poor meal when I was growing up - the thing my parents made to stretch the budget because you just buy a super cheap cut and cook it all day to make it edible, along with cheap veggies. Now those meals are damn near a delicacy considering the cost of the meat. Chicken isn’t much better either at the moment. Grocery shopping has become exhausting.
My local Shop-Rite still has cheap-ass chicken, at least. They’ve always had these packs of chicken (breast, legs or thighs) of about 6 or 7 pounds that cost $10 total. Thank god I like hot dogs, too – stores still damn near give those away.
power/gas /water isnt telling its customers that the rates are going up because of AI datacenters, i saw our parents rates increase as well.
I have a family with 3 teenage boys, I spend $100 pretty much every day…
Food is famously a luxury good so it makes sense people would pull back in order to spend their money on necessities like bombs to drop on foreign elementary schools and shit
and foreign AID to a country who doesnt need money for thier own healthcare.
Don’t forget to save for some children’s hospital bombs too
I’m trying to limit my avocado toasts to just 3 times a week.
and your gold flakes on you filet mignon.
Whoa, moneybags over here just casually mentioning they eat a whole avocado and also get three square pieces of bread every week.
I haven’t eaten for three weeks so I can donate more bombs as a patriotic act. I’m doing my part!
Tapping into America’s strategic fat reserves.
I use mine to buy necessities like gasoline to make molotov cocktails out of the empty bottles I collect from the trash.
Be careful not to accidentally drop any styrofoam from old food and beverage containers into those molotovs, lest they become all sticky and napalm-y!
I like the headline:
“It’s a problem for the food companies that the customer don’t have money”Capitalism is an infection of the soul.
They should be patient and wait for it to trickle down.
this should be the true economic indicator, not the fucking DOW. idc if the DOW is fifty million, if people cant afford food we have a major fucking problem.
It’s a true economic indicator for the top 10%, those that have assets. It doesn’t say anything about the bottom 90%. But these days the top 10% drive so much of consumption they’re the ones that count for leadership.
DJIA is not an economic indicator. The index highlights half of the relation between Industrials and Transports (DJTA). The S&P 500 is closer to an economic indicator but still not really. The Dow is usually referenced as a distraction from real indicators like the Capitalization to GDP ratio (aka Buffett Indicator). If one looks at the real indicators, we’ve been in some real economy ending doom for quite a while now.
But Pam Bondi said that all that matters is that the Dow is at 50k, not these Epstein files!
In Canada we are spending like 120% of our income on groceries and it isnt just the inflation but the compounding shrinkflation with climate crisis causing inclement weather that means crop insecurity…
It aint looking good and at this point companies are going to have to realize they cant profit if nobody has any money to spend
and canada ignoring climate change as is every other country, and you have massive wildifres going on too. shrinkflation was pretty noticble early in the pandemic, in never went away. all toothpastes(crest) were affected, they try to be sneaky by making thier 8.2 to 5.4, or 4.6 to 4.3 oz, plus changing the ingredients enough that they had to use so much mint oil to mask the taste(the mint oil and other ingredients are known allergens to the lips)
These grocery stores have been locking up a lot of items as well further shooting themselves in the foot because they refuse to look long term.
Went to buy a tent the other day and it had one of those electric alarms on it. Ive never seen anything else in that store with an alarm.
that’s every company. no one looks long term. it’s quarter by quarter. they all “live in the now”.
The whole locking up of items or transitioning to self check outs was an attempt to A. blame the price increases on shoplifters and B. encourage people to transition to shopping online. Neither of which worked. you could literally live in a 0 crime society and they’d still jack up the prices.
That’s OK, they’ll just raise prices more to make up for the falling consumption! /s
Remember, the only two nations to vote against food – FOOD being a human right at the UN a few years ago were… the USA and Israel.
My go-to “relatively easy, quick and cheap” meal is some kind of grilled meat with a side salad.
Well meat is expensive as hell, and salad components are widely contaminated. FML I guess.
And skip the bread roles unless you’d like a side of broken glass.
Shoppers are buying fewer items than a year ago, and grocery sales are declining as weakening unit sales are now outweighing rising prices.
You maximize profit by raising prices until the units sold fall to the point where prices * units falls below the peak. The peak is where profit is maximized. It seems they’ve reached it. For the next little while they’ll keep on cutting costs to grow profits. Recipe reformulations with fewer and cheaper ingredients, cheaper substitutions, more soy and water in the sausages, and other general quality reductions.
Recipe reformulations with fewer and cheaper ingredients, cheaper substitutions, more soy and water in the sausages, and other general quality reductions.
I’m wondering when they’ll start using recycled paper/cardboard as an ingredient with an innocuous-sounding name like “cellulose gum” or something. It’s probably already started.
Would someone please think of the companies!?
