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
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.
Would someone please think of the companies!?
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.
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.
I have a family with 3 teenage boys, I spend $100 pretty much every day…
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.
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
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.
Won’t someone think of the shareholders???
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.
Probably doesn’t help that some of the food can give you weeks long explosive diarrhea.
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
Pressure to bring prices down right? Less demand means lower prices right? The free market is a lie
Starting to think if prices go up ozempic starts to become cost effective
If prices keep going up you probably won’t need ozempic.
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?
