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.
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
Don’t forget to save for some children’s hospital bombs too
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’m trying to limit my avocado toasts to just 3 times a week.
Whoa, moneybags over here just casually mentioning they eat a whole avocado and also get three square pieces of bread every week.
and your gold flakes on you filet mignon.
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!
and foreign AID to a country who doesnt need money for thier own healthcare.
Pressure on food companies? Loads of people not being able to afford much food seems like maybe those people are under some pressure too, and maybe that’s the more important part?
Yes, but are you considering the shareholders?
Yeah, we should steal food from them.
Remember, companies are people. The GOP knows they are the most important people and are far more important than the people who are people.
I like the headline:
“It’s a problem for the food companies that the customer don’t have money”
They should be patient and wait for it to trickle down.
Capitalism is an infection of the soul.
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.
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!
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.
I’d buy a lot more food if my job paid me more. Instead, rice and beans baby. Maybe a splurge on champagne every time a key republican dies, but that’s it.
Rice and beans are pretty good though, especially if you add in a little salsa or some grape tomatoes and a sprinkle of shredded cheese.
Oh yeah. I throw anything in there. I sincerely enjoy it, in addition to it being cheap. But I used to buy a lot of other stuff too.
Ya. I’m cooking some ground pork to throw in the leftover beans from yesterday.
Gonna dump that slop on top of a nuked potato. That will fill the plate.
Tomorrow I’ll do a fresh batch of beans. Or rice. Or both. So much variety!
And fuk, I still eat pretty good. It’s just not very exciting.
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.
Would someone please think of the companies!?
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.
I have a family with 3 teenage boys, I spend $100 pretty much every day…
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.
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 / month to $30.
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
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.
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.
I suck at math but even I know that stagnation of wages + increase in cost of rent + increase in cost of food = bad times.
Wages continue to stagnate or people are being laid off left right and center and these knuckleheads are all shocked pikachu face that no one is buying while continuing to raise prices?
But, but, but, the stock market!
It’s over 50k!
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
All I know is, I’m 43, when I was a kid in the 90s we’d go grocery shopping and have an overflowing cart that was around $100. Now, the same cart $100 isn’t enough to cover the wire mesh at the bottom of the cart. It’s absolutely insane. I bet it would be $400 to fill the cart. That’s not inflation thats a scam.
It is absolutely a scam. Remember the egg shortage? Eggs were going for $7+ a dozen in SoCal and a few miles across the border the prices had only risen slightly to maybe $2.50/dozen.
And now there’s this:
Egg producers will pay $3.3M and donate 53 million eggs to settle price fixing claims
Forcing U.S. egg producers to pay a minuscule 0.37% fine on $1.22 billion in excess profits sends an unmistakable message to businesses everywhere. With Trump in charge they can fleece Americans without the slightest fear of consequences and they are doing just that.
I genuinely don’t know how families are doing it. I spend as much on food as a single person as my parents did with a family in the early 2000s. Granted, we didn’t eat much, but we didn’t starve, and I don’t eat much either. I rarely eat meat, I don’t go to restaurants, and maybe once every month or two I’ll “treat” myself to a gas station meal or a bagel sandwich from a coffee shop. I’m so glad I don’t have children to try to feed.
old man here. I am not exaggerating to say you could have large paper grocery bags full of food using a 20 and get change back. Those paper grocery bags held more than twice the standard plastic ones from today. I keep complaining that places still have signs saying they won’t take over a 20 when that was what everything would take when I was a kid. Nobody had signs saying they won’t take anything over a 5 or 10.
Im close to your age, I worked in a grocery store when I was a kid. I recall one repeat customer who had several children, and would fill two carts. I remember being blown away that this woman was spending $200 on groceries.
Now I have one kid living with me, and my grocery bill approaches $200 if I’m not very careful on what I buy.
Pressure to bring prices down right? Less demand means lower prices right? The free market is a lie
People can’t afford to buy food? Please think about poor Nestlé, they might make slightly less profit this year.
