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.
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.
This is because of all the people who just got kicked off food stamps because of the big beautiful bill
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
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.
Have they tried paying people more?
Sorry, no…Best we can do is charge you more for groceries, gas, and basic necessities.
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.
That dude in the picture definitely has his pants stuffed full of stolen shit, right?
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.
Won’t someone think of the shareholders???
yeah. especially those on snap. or I mean used to be on snap. im sure it won’t have any knock on effects. hey lets do more farm subsidies rather than subsidizing those disgusting poors food habits.
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 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’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.
Don’t forget to save for some children’s hospital bombs too
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!
I like the headline:
“It’s a problem for the food companies that the customer don’t have money”Starting to think if prices go up ozempic starts to become cost effective
If prices keep going up you probably won’t need ozempic.
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!?
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
