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The US grocery slowdown is real

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Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#51

Post by aziaziazi »

hadlock wrote: post #41
nvme0n1p1 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consumers are the last group I would blame. https://www.usda.gov/about-food/food-safety/food-loss-and-wa... > food waste is estimated at ... 133 billion pounds ... in 2010. USA population in 2010 was 311M. 133B / 311M = 427 pounds per person. I sincerely doubt the average consumer throws away 427 pounds of fresh food in a year.

When I got married our food waste probably tripled. My food waste as a single guy was significantly less than married. When I had kids it probably tripled again. Much like a horse to water, you cannot explain to a 3 year old that if they don't eat all the banannas before tomorrow, they will go bad. We probably throw out 1-2 lbs of fruit a week, which is ~100 lbs a year right there. The kid might have ate 2 lbs of blu…

Ripes bananas makes the best cakes or pancakes ! I got your point though.

Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#52

Post by wahern »

dyauspitr wrote: post #40
Avicebron wrote: post #3

They should just lead with people don't have any money to buy things because wages aren't increasing to match living expenses. It cuts back some of the fig leaves

Meat is like $30/lb. What a joke, I see almost no one at the butcher counter in grocery stores anymore.

AFAIU, when beef prices started to spike a year or two ago, ranchers decided to cash in and slaughter much of their herd, including breeding stock. This was on top of a decades-long decline in herd size, and a recent drought that has driven up costs of maintaining a herd--another reason why they decided to cull and cash-in.

The current situation will be the new normal for at least the next several years. Chicken hasn't risen nearly as much, just moderately more than inflation, perhaps because of a shift of demand away from beef.

There also seems to be greater price discrimination going on with beef than previously, with larger spreads between, e.g., bulk ground vs vacuum packed ground vs whole cuts.

Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#53

Post by cm2012 »

Avicebron wrote: post #3

They should just lead with people don't have any money to buy things because wages aren't increasing to match living expenses. It cuts back some of the fig leaves

This is much more likely due to competition from food delivery services. Spend on which has shot up dramatically because at least in the United States average incomes have actually risen substantially since 2015.

Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#54

Post by altairprime »

mrob wrote: post #49
hadlock wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I got married our food waste probably tripled. My food waste as a single guy was significantly less than married. When I had kids it probably tripled again. Much like a horse to water, you cannot explain to a 3 year old that if they don't eat all the banannas before tomorrow, they will go bad. We probably throw out 1-2 lbs of fruit a week, which is ~100 lbs a year right there. The kid might have ate 2 lbs of blu…

>they don't eat all the banannas before tomorrow, they will go bad This one specifically has a good solution: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_bread

The missing datapoint is that households are having to work more labor-hours per banana every year for decades, so the energy necessary to cook banana bread is in direct competition with the energy necessary to purchase bananas. Atomic Era assumptions that a household has the time, energy, capability, appliances, and electricity budget to cook banana bread no longer reliably hold in the U.S. and cannot be taken for granted as accessible to all families. (If this seems like a negative feedback loop, it is; see also food deserts, substitution of Added Sugars for more expensive-but-nutritional calories in the diets of our majority-obese population, and so on.)

Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#55

Post by eth0up »

stavros wrote: post #42
eth0up wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right on one thing.*1 But I need to push back on something.*2 The claim that everything is real is too broad and I'd urge caution in making such a blanket assumption. It would be epistemically reckless of me to agree here. It is also possible that the pattern you are seeing is simply a result of users absorbing the vernacular of LLMs. And calling it poetry is not supported by the actual content and I don't th…

Pretty good, but it's missing the punchiness of "we wrote ten articles, and here's what we've learned: every tip, every misstep, every verbal tic". I hate how it's everywhere now. Even my coworkers speak like this.

The critique of my performance you are making is not an insult, not necessarily disagreement -really big juicy emdash- but a somber reference to the common punctuation style that many are understandably becoming frustrated with.

Edit: There are three ways to address this......

Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#56

Post by darth_avocado »

Avicebron wrote: post #3

They should just lead with people don't have any money to buy things because wages aren't increasing to match living expenses. It cuts back some of the fig leaves

Everything costs too much. I went to the grocery store yesterday I spent $50 to get a packet of bread, a dozen eggs, two yogurts, two yellow onions, a jalapeno, two tomatoes and a bunch of parsley. This covers breakfast for 2 days for my partner and I. In 2022, $150 would fetch the entire week’s groceries for the two of us. We are paying more, while having to change what we eat with cheaper/unhealthier options. Otherwise we would be spending almost $1500/month on just groceries for 2.

I used to eat high quality fish every week, now it’s beans and cheaper cuts of chicken. And we make good money, but our wages have gone down since 2022 when adjusted for inflation.

Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#57

Post by Wonnk13 »

I'm not surprised. K shaped economy, any sector that isn't high tech / AI is stagnant. It's rough out there. I've been saying since Covid, retailers have figured out some consumers aren't as price sensitive as previously thought. WholeFoods doesn't need to cut prices, but the lower tier grocery stores will really feel the cutbacks.

Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#59

Post by fluidcruft »

gustavus wrote: post #14

> Our analysis of NielsenIQ grocery data shows a trend in negative unit growth starting in mid-2025, masked by steady price increases. But since February 2026, units have stepped down sharply enough to pull sales lower across the US. Prices are still climbing 2% to 3% year over year, Seems pretty straightforward. They increased their price to try and make up for losses, which in turn mean less people purchasing, whic…

Yeah it's real rocket science at work here. Grocery bill keeps going up and less and lower quality food comes home. It's a real mystery.

Re: The US grocery slowdown is real

#60

Post by jmyeet »

Journalist Alfred Henry Lewis said over a century ago that civilization is only 9 meals away from anarchy. I fear in the coming years we are going to be testing that theory.

Another quote that springs to mind is "Corporations behave like they're annoyed that they have to go through you to get to your money". The pandemic was a catalyst for a change in attitude by American corporations who were afraid to raise prices. That fear is now gone. Every aspect of corporations now are dedicated to raising prices and the easiest thing to raise prices on is things with inelastic demand. Food, housing, electricity. It's the entire basis of private equity, which seeks "pricing power". That's just another way of saying "inelastic demand".

All of this has been exacerbated by a pointless, unwinnable foreign war in Iran at the behest of a foreign state (ie Israel). The only thing thus far that has prevented a global economic collapse is China [1] but that is about to bite because the US SPR is about to hit the effective minimum [2]. And now the issue isn't going to be crude oil but shortages of refined petroleum products, particularly diesel. You can see this by looking at the 3-2-1 Crack Spread [3], which itself is also going to get worse because of the destruction of an estimated 40% of Russia's refining capacity, which has already resulted in halting diesel exports.

Diesel prices are a huge factor in inflation [4]. Another lagging issue here is that much of the crops planted in the northern hemisphere this year received less or no fertilizer because of the Iran war. That's likely to cause a famine impacting tens of millions of people and will further drive up food prices.

Rents keep going up. Food prices keep going up. Inflation keeps going up. The one thing that doesn't keep going up are wages. And people are rapidly running out of money to absorb it. And the American government that is inflicting this on not only the US but really the world, does not care.

[1]: https://www.indiatoday.in/business/story/china-oil-imports-i...

[2]: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/oil-stocks-us-strate...

[3]: https://rbnenergy.com/market-data/3-2-1-crack-spread

[4]: https://realeconomy.rsmus.com/market-minute-diesel-trucking-...

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