The US grocery slowdown is real

https://www.bain.com/insights/the-us-grocery-slowdown-is-real-snap-chart/

by toomuchtodo • 5 days ago

87 136 5 days ago

Avicebron• 5 days ago

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

quantified• 5 days ago

Probably cuts back on some of the epic waste on the consumer side. Hope that ripples to cutting down waste throughout the system. Paying for stuff that isn't consumed is by definition waste.

nvme0n1p12• 5 days ago

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.

billfor• 5 days ago

They should just lead with saying that obesity rates have tripled since the 1960s and maybe they will start declining a bit now.

estearum2• 5 days ago

Very well-supported argument by the fact that obesity tends to accumulate in the well-off who can afford lots of food, while poor folks tend to be slender. So yeah, clearly lower spending on food would reduce obesity.

dyauspitr3• 5 days ago

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

saltcured• 5 days ago

One of the most common interactions I witness at our local supermarket butcher counter is the guy explaining to yet another customer that the advertised weekly special sold out before lunch a couple days prior.

wahern• 5 days ago

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.

irishcoffee4• 5 days ago

We buy a side of beef at a time from a farm down the street for $6/lb, up from $4 a few years ago. Can’t buy beef any other way.

gruez2• 5 days ago

Meat is like $30/lb.

???

Maybe if you're buying organic grass fed steaks every day, but chicken/pork is still available for less than $5, especially on sale. Kroger's weekly ad for Dallas, TX shows:

1. beef for $6.97/lb

2. pork for $1.99/lb

3. chicken breasts for $3.99/lb, or organic for $6.99/lb

https://www.kroger.com/weeklyad

cm2012• 5 days ago

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.

darth_avocado8• 5 days ago

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.

reliabilityguy3• 5 days ago

Where are you located? I think even NYCs groceries are not that expensive.

Brybry• 5 days ago

I feel like some of that is maybe shopping at the wrong place. Which the article I guess covers by saying people are addressing by changing retailers to save money.

Where I am in the US, you can get a dozen eggs for ~$2 at Walmart. A loaf of bread with 22 slices is like $2 to $6 depending on store brand vs name brand. The canned refried beans I buy are still $1.30 to $1.50 for 4-5 servings.

Some stuff is way too expensive (beef) but other food items seem at normal prices to me.

pllbnk• 5 days ago

I'm in Europe. I have been tracking my all expenses to the cent religiously since 2010 in Excel sheets. I also haven't changed my grocery habits much since around 2020, except very recently when I actually started looking at the deals (discounts) and buying more generic stuff. We haven't been eating out much (~5 times per month on average) Obviously, it varies month-by-month but my family's (2 adults, not counting the child) expenses on food have risen by around 100% since 2022.

UncleMeat2• 4 days ago

Where?

At least where I live if I went to Kroger I’d spend $6 on bread, two tubs of Fage would be $14, eggs are like $3, the parsley would be like $1.50 and the rest of the veggies comes out to about $5.

darth_avocado8• 4 days ago

I can’t edit the comment but I think people have a reactionary response to this comment, and are comparing grocery prices at the cheapest store available to them.

The comment was meant as a comparison to the same store prices in 2022. If your argument is that “Walmart is cheaper, shop there”, how much more expensive is Walmart as compared to 2022? If your argument is that “don’t buy everything at the same store or buy cheaper brands”, is that something you had to do before or is that your response to raised prices. If your argument is “well you live in an expensive, I don’t”, has your grocery bill remained the same as compared to your income from a few years ago (you could’ve gotten a promotion or a new job, but that’s not the point).

Also keep in mind, shop at XYZ is not really a great way to think about this because not everyone has access to the same stores.

inigyou3• 5 days ago

By living expenses, you mean rent. You should just say rent. It cuts back on another fig leaf.

Rent is the only part of our economy in which money is forcibly taken at gunpoint by someone who never did any work to earn it.

The groceries at the grocery store are expensive because of the grocery store's rent, too.

somekyle2• 5 days ago

We seemingly have very different experiences with rent. All rent I've paid was agreed upon prior to me being charged it, and guns were never involved. The people I rented from did the work of owning/managing the building and providing it for my use. Maybe this isn't a noble way to earn money, but I found it to be a really useful service, and it seems not dramatically different than most services I pay for (how much incremental work is Netflix doing for my behalf? what work is the bank doing to earn my loan?).

tzs• 5 days ago

Walmart groceries have also gotten more expensive and Walmart owns the land that the vast majority of its stores are on.

eudamoniac2• 4 days ago

Have you ever owned a building? It's kind of a huge pain in the ass to maintain. A huger pain in the ass to improve it. I wouldn't do it for free.

BearOso• 5 days ago

The article is from Bain Capital. Of course they're going to ignore the obvious reason and blame something else. They raised prices more than people are willing to pay. Unlimited profit growth can't exist.

markoman• 5 days ago

Bain Capital and Bain & Co. are separate, but what's interesting is that the former was spun off from the latter in 1984 as a way to apply and profit from the learned business juice (i.e., wisdom?) of the Harvard & Wharton MBAs that they hire.

fragmede• 5 days ago

Can't ignore the GLP-1 choice though. If a customer spends, say $200 month on a GLP-1, and saves that much by not buying groceries, that also results in a grocery slow down.

hoytschermerhrn• 4 days ago

I really can’t imagine that matters at the scale of data we’re talking about here. If you can’t afford groceries, you certainly can’t afford bleeding-edge vanity drugs.

bmitc2• 5 days ago

Wages is one thing. Our sitting president inacting vast amounts of tariffs and other asinine decisions is another thing and is the reason why no one has even less money these days. Ever since he took office, my available funds have dwindled drastically despite reductions in spending and increases in salary.

alephnerd• 5 days ago

What is interesting is the subnational breakdown - volumes have been decreasing in the US West for over a year compared to the rest of the US, and overall sales have also decreased as well whereas they are stagnant in the rest of the US.

bakies• 4 days ago

Drought? Less local farming?

qdotme5• 5 days ago

Or.. is it a GLP-1 byproduct? These are powerful appetite suppressants.. in fact I'm curious if the mechanism of action of these peptides affects other impulse behavior, including impulse purchasing?

We know that people buy more when they are hungry. They also buy more when the smells of food are in the store (the other benefit of rotisserie chicken).

kennethologist• 5 days ago

"Early studies suggest that GLP-1s may be effective in treating opioid, alcohol and nicotine addiction. Researchers are examining whether the drugs can also help people who are addicted to gambling, sex and shopping, among other things."

https://med.stanford.edu/news/insights/2025/04/ozempic-addic...

qdotme5• 5 days ago

Yeah - powerful confounder to all the analyses of customer behavior. Even the article itself calls it out - there probably is a good way to segment it, as GLP1 availability is not uniform, some states regulate it more tightly etc.

paleotrope2• 5 days ago

12% of the adult population. I think it's a good theory.

mh-• 5 days ago

In the US today, about 15% of adults have tried GLP-1s, with 7% currently taking them, according to research based on Bain’s proprietary GLP-1 adoption model.

Is the 12% from another source?

fullshark• 5 days ago

The analysis mentions this, says it's a factor and links to:

https://www.bain.com/insights/weight-loss-drug-users-spend-l...

qdotme5• 5 days ago

It certainly does, I mentioned it in an comment below, good callout.

I am however also more interested in how this affects other types of consumer behavior - and whether that is a factor in pullback on the economy (on top of other factors - energy, job market, trade restrictions).

anukin2• 5 days ago

I am inclined towards thinking that it is probably this as there is also decline in fast food demand.

bloaf• 5 days ago

Obesity rates have been declining over the same time period.

Animats• 5 days ago

Ozempic drops grocery purchases by about 5%.[1]

[1] https://foodlore.blog/glp1-ozempic-effect-food-industry/

gustavus• 5 days ago

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, which they responded to by increasing prices. A lovely little circle.

Maybe some economists should investigate how prices effects demand, could be groundbreaking.

fluidcruft2• 5 days ago

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.

anukin2• 5 days ago

People underestimate the impact of glp1 drugs on this. They should also correlate with decline in fast food consumption.

dqv2• 5 days ago

I don't know how to estimate the impact tbh. The same article links to https://www.bain.com/insights/weight-loss-drug-users-spend-l...

How much does 7% of the population spending 4% less on groceries impact the numbers in the original article?

mhitza• 5 days ago

I think that is also big factor why many, very many, products contain now protein, and the exessive protein food receipes on social media.

dyauspitr3• 5 days ago

I don’t think a large percentage of the American population is paying $500/month for glp1.

hombre_fatal• 5 days ago

I doubt it. I'd wager the opposite: we like to overestimate the most interesting explanations vs. the boring ones.

My sedentary, calorie dense, UberEats-at-2am 5000 calorie lifestyle isn't why I'm fat -- it's the "seed oils".

tencentshill• 5 days ago

Trump put a little orange thumb on the scale by choosing Walmart to be the winner on beef prices. Did they weigh for government interference?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/grocery/2026/07/08/walmart-ro...

gruez2• 5 days ago

From your own article:

The Walmart price reductions "looks less like a turning point on food inflation and more like an aggressive summer promotion," David Ortega, a food economist and professor at Michigan State University

Also the your claim that "Trump put a little orange thumb on the scale by choosing Walmart to be the winner on beef prices" doesn't make any sense. This isn't the soviet union. The government doesn't control enough production to be able to offer walmart sweetheart deals. The best they can do is browbeat walmart into lowering prices, but that's not the same as "choosing Walmart to be the winner".

amanaplanacanal3• 5 days ago

Yeah this is just trump taking credit for something that was already planned.

the__alchemist• 5 days ago

Is delivery services accounted for? I buy 1/3 I did a year ago, as Amazon's services are so convenient, and not much more expensive. (Especially since I throw out less now)

dqv2• 5 days ago

No way to know what data sources NielsenIQ is using, but for what it lacks in data from retailers, it probably makes up for by way of consumers' receipts.

JoeAltmaier• 5 days ago

Shelves are fairly spotty in my town. Never saw that before, not in 50 years.

kart23• 5 days ago

cooking one or two portions at home using quality ingredients from stores in SF is literally as pricey as eating out nowadays.

doesn't surprise me that people are trying to get their dollars to stretch further by buying in bulk, planning ahead more consciously, etc.

reactordev3• 5 days ago

Every corner of your life where you think you are safe, stable, and able to save will be found and min/maxed for ultimate profits.

silisili• 5 days ago

Honestly, it's always been that way for a lot of things. Ten years ago I remember trying to make the ultimate home pizza, spent over $30 in ingredients and realized it's cheaper to buy out. Same with hamburgers - unless you can use all of the ingredients to make 5 or 6.

Restaurants have always been rather low margin, and they're buying ingredients a heckofa lot cheaper than a single shopper can.

stasomatic2• 4 days ago

Costco rotisserie chicken at $5.99. I know it's their door buster, but since they won't increase prices on principle, it's the least expensive protein in town, delicious too.

Try to make one yourself for $5.99 when just a pound of chicken thighs at the same store is $3/lbs.

Wonnk13• 5 days ago

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.

reliabilityguy3• 5 days ago

In NYC Amazon fresh is cheaper than most of the grocery stores, except maybe some things like frozen food in Trader Joe.

We simply stopped buying food in the grocery store across the street: Amazon fresh on many positions can be like 50% cheaper.

claaams• 5 days ago

Mr Bezos thanks you for your support and sends his regards.

jmyeet• 5 days ago

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-...

macintux• 5 days ago

Imagine how expensive it’s going to be for the world to help Russia if it collapses.

christophilus2• 5 days ago

Depends. Russia has a lot of natural resources and some good land. I imagine the world will take its cut as a return on whatever help we render.

realityfactchex• 5 days ago

Theoretically I'm kinda rich, but I feel the crunch at the grocery store.

I buy the highest quality, lowest cost stuff I can find.

There can be a positive story here maybe though:

- More doordash = less grocery

- More farmer's market = less grocery

- More home-grown = less grocery

Though TFA points out,

  80% of Americans say they're still trying to spend less
  28% are actively trying to cut back on groceries
  56% are trading down to lower-priced brands
  49% are simply buying fewer items,
  44% are leaning harder on coupons and promotions

BTW my nearest grocery shut down this quarter. Couldn't make money. Got to go farther now.

eth0up• 5 days ago

Is the whole Straight of Hormuz fertilizer shortage just FUD, or should we be preparing to see this "real"ness get a lot more real in the coming months or season?

I think it's a legitimate concern, and just one of many problems. Couple that with inflation (yes, and rising costs self compounding), petrol problems, pressure on the dollar, income stagnation, loads of other fun things and the wondrous introduction of LLM magic into every orifice of society, where should we expect this all leads to?

I am always looking for reasons to let my inner optimist shine through. Help, anyone?

Edit: I expect I will be chastened by vegans for the following, but..

I no longer buy milk. Organic milk up from an astonishing ~$5 to an average of $7.50 per gallon now.

I do not buy much meat, but beef is no longer an option. Yeah, it was subsidized, but that doesn't mean it's getting more affordable.

But really, I can no longer afford fresh vegetables. And though I lean vegetarian, that is quickly becoming an unhealthy option.

djoldman• 5 days ago

The variation in prices of staple foods between different stores has exploded in Chicago. For what it's worth, Aldi is significantly cheaper for many items. It's gotten a lot busier there too.

xnx2• 5 days ago

Consumers have been optimizing for convenience over being value shoppers.

Grocery prices at Aldi, Walmart, Costco are amazingly low, especially when accounting for the freshness, quality, and variety of foods today vs. 30 years ago.

swed420• 5 days ago

Grocery prices at Aldi, Walmart, Costco are amazingly low, especially when accounting for the freshness, quality, and variety of foods today vs. 30 years ago.

Many prices at those places have doubled in the last ten years or less.

jerlam• 5 days ago

Although we are right in the middle of a cyclospora outbreak.

entrepy123• 5 days ago

The 18-month data charts in TFA don't give much information for comparing "this" with the past. I wish it went back 30 or 50 years. I like that the default view is units sold, looks like 2026 is a worse year for grocery stores compared with last year. Sales dollars is still growing, though slower that it grew in the past, and apparently only by jacking up prices.

So here's page with a line chart and downloadable CSV data, with a ~79 year lookback best as could quickly be found [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA

In short: Don't worry, this one is just a 1974 or 2008 or 1992 or 1981 style blip. Hopefully. It always recovered before. (Before 1947, data is sketchy/excluded though.)

People did wait in soup and bread lines in the 1930s, I think. Check the online libraries, you'll find entire books from the early 1900s on how to make economical tasty meals on a shoestring budget.

We can do better. But it's not going to be by relying on large corps to help us out, probably.

It's going to be by reinventing the systems that are utterly broken.

[0] U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. Real personal consumption expenditures: Nondurable goods: Food and beverages purchased for off-premises consumption (chain-type quantity index). Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARA3Q086SBEA

mythrwy• 5 days ago

I'm just one small data point, and significantly in the minority I'm sure, but I got chickens and started gardening hard 4 or 5 years ago and get around 1/3 of my food from there.

susiecambria• 5 days ago

Not sure a cut of $186m between 2025 and 2034 warrants the cavalier description -- "benefits were scaled back" -- of changes to SNAP in the BBB.

In the immediate term, "Approximately 4 million people in a typical month will lose some or all of their SNAP food benefits once the changes are fully implemented, based on Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates." according to the Center on Policy and Budget Priorities. [1] I'm not sure what is going to happen in my community (rural Virginia with a good portion of federal and federal-adjacent retirees living here full-time) as people continue to be kicked off SNAP. Food pantries are serving more people than at the beginning of 2025. I've not investigated the status of donations. But anecdotally, friends are giving fewer food items to emergency pantries.

But as is the case with other aid programs, there is a public benefit to public benefits: "Here’s the remarkable thing about SNAP: it’s one of the highest return investments the government makes. According to USDA Economic Research Service data, every $1 in SNAP benefits generates approximately $1.50 to $1.80 in economic activity. During the Great Recession, that multiplier reached $1.84." The question is, with the reduction in people served coupled with work requirements, will the follow-on economic benefits be realized between now and 2034? How will low-income households fare?

[1] https://www.cbpp.org/research/food-assistance/many-low-incom... [2] https://polimetrics.substack.com/p/the-hidden-economic-engin...

OutOfHere• 5 days ago

I suspect the Organic foods market will keep growing. Moreover, various Organic foods are routinely out of stock, suggesting a high demand to supply ratio.

jbrooks84• 5 days ago

People are broke and on GLP1s

The US grocery slowdown is real

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