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.
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.
The same greedy bastard would charge us for oxygen if they could. I am middle of the middle class and my grocery shopping has changed dramatically thanks to the shareholders and executives making life more difficult.
Pressure to bring prices down right? Less demand means lower prices right? The free market is a lie
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?
Remember, companies are people. The GOP knows they are the most important people and are far more important than the people who are people.
Yes, but are you considering the shareholders?
Yeah, we should steal food from them.
You mean those same food companies that literally were found guilty of price fixing and then got a slap on the wrist, which was the best that we could do under the law, for manufacturing scarcity and screwing Americans over?
Pressure on those food companies?
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!
Fuck anyone who makes millions off of basic human rights
[ drops SM-58 mic ]
[ the floor breaks ]
We can’t even build floors right anymore. Too expensive.
People can’t afford to buy food? Please think about poor Nestlé, they might make slightly less profit this year.
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
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.
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 use mine to buy necessities like gasoline to make molotov removedtails 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.
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.
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.
That’s one way to solve the obesity epidemic…
thats what GLP-1 is for.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
