Americans are buying less groceries; unit sales were flat most of 2025 and declined about 2% year over year in most months since February 2026, according to data from Bain & Company and NielsenIQ shared exclusively with CNBC. CNBC’s Brandon Gomez has the details on what that means for retailers as this trend is likely to continue unless other financial pressures ease.
Years of elevated grocery prices are forcing retailers like Walmart and Kroger to spend more keeping prices low even as shoppers buy fewer items.
those poor wickle wealth extraction organisations are the real victims in all of this
A very fancy way of saying the retailers are having to accept lower margins as the cost of the things they buy to resell stay high.
They’re also really aggressively negotiating supplier cost down at the same time and just gobbling up the difference. It’s not that they’re actually accepting lower margins, they’re making really broad use of deceptive pricing practices like jacking up the price before putting it on sale.
Your formerly $5 stick of deodorant now costs $7 on sale, but the “real” price is $11. Thank golly the retailer is doing so much to keep prices low! It only went up by $2 instead of $6!
May or may not mean that.
This isn’t even happening, so I’m not sure what they mean
They sort of explain loss leaders later in the segment. I don’t think they take a hit to their overall profit margin, but they might take a hit on items for which they know customers have a price memory.
People less money.
Thing cost big money.
People buy less thing.
There you go CNBC. My $250K check better clear before Wednesday.
Meanwhile economists are convinced that inflation leads people to buy more things and deflation makes people buy less things.
They’re correct but only if wages inflate at the same pace as prices. If there’s a mismatch it’s because the real economy is contracting as a result of the dumbass war the president started in a foreign country. The price of that is obviously going to have to be paid by someone.
Uhhhh I guess I could see that being true for a limited segment of the population. Those with disposable income at some given moment.
I think that’s part of the reasoning for keeping inflation around ~3% or so on purpose. Basically it incentivizes not hoarding cash but rather spending it or at least investing it since it will devalue over time and you become poorer.
But as far as people buying stuff due to inflation, I do have to admit I have purchased a few things as inflation skyrocketed. I saw them going up and I “knew” (was proven correct) that the prices were not coming back to a sane level. Might as well get them on the way up rather than keep waiting and the price will only keep getting worse and worse… or something along those lines.
But I can only imagine that scenario plays out a small number of times and only for an already small amount of the population. On the whole of course inflation depresses things. People buy less because they’re scared (sort of the opposite of my scenario I suppose) and/or people buying less because, well, it’s all they can buy. Even if there is some jump in sales of some products, and maybe there is I dunno I haven’t looked, it’s going to be only short term and then one has to assume the drop off will be like off a cliff. I don’t think anyone needs a phd in anything except Bird Science (adjacent to Bird Law) to say “that’s pretty fucking stupid and shortsighted.”
I think that’s part of the reasoning for keeping inflation around ~3% or so on purpose.
ze price stabilité.Unironically, the Sunday Friend does a perfect job of explaining the core of inflationary economics because he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about, goes completely mask off, and drops 100% of the economic theory behind that concept: none at all, it’s just to stop people from saving their money.
Disco Elysium Spoilers
He’s actually a Moralintern agent posing as an economic bureaucrat, which is why he has no idea what he’s talking about but does actually understand that the core of that economic model is to prevent people from building savings. He’s politically conservative, and only exists politically within neoliberalism because it’s the dominant economic model of Elysium. He doesn’t actually believe any of the things he says, it’s just hawk babble.
“But this doesn’t work on labor: trust me.” - same economists.
Ok sure, but can you say it in a way that makes the working class pity the big sad corporations?
How is this a whole article?
We all decided food is a luxury for the rich. So we don’t buy as much, because food is for rich people. It’s that simple.
20 seconds to explain what’s happening. 3 minutes for deflections
A contradiction of capitalism: high prices mean less profits. Luxury brands are, overall, not as profitable as consumer brands because consumer brands might have a lower per-item profit margin but they also have far more customers. One goal of capitalism in its earlier industrial period is lowering prices, not raising them, in order to increase market share (“Our Ford” is an obvious example of this). But in the (god willing, final) monopoly-financial-imperial stage of capitalism, the relentless rent-seeking middle-man nature of capitalism has throttled the productive forces, reduced investment in infrastructure, and made it impossible for consumer brands to keep prices low. Sometimes they jack up prices because they can get away with it and they need to show an increase in profit in their quarterly earnings report, sometimes they jack up prices because they have no choice. The result is that fewer people are buying, which is devastating (over time) for consumer brands. Real wages have likewise been stagnant in the imperial core for decades, meaning that a confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is only a question of when. (In a settler-colonial context like the USA, race tends to take the place of class, although there are exceptions.)
I was talking with a woman who works for Land O Lakes butter and she told me how they are losing sales because the butter is more expensive than the store brand and Kroger. LO’L cut their wholesale price to Kroger to try and lower the price and get more sales, but Kroger just kept the store price the same and pocketed the difference. But somehow liberals are still convinced that supply and demand economics is the answer and markets will solve everything.
but Kroger just kept the store price the same and pocketed the difference.
gotta keep the wholesale price the same and do a mail-in rebate or some shit
nobody knows how such things even work anymore… “you mean i have to actually put this in an envelope with like a $1.25 stamp on it and wait two weeks to get my $1.35 rebate?”
(In a settler-colonial context like the USA, race tends to take the place of class, although there are exceptions.
I think we’re running up to the limits for both base and superstructure reasons. At the base, white supremacy gets commitment from white workers because it delivers them the goods. Whether that’s the period of active settlement bestowing huge tracts of free land with little state oversight, the industrial era woth explicitly superior conditions and wages for white workers at all levels, the post-war period’s white suburban paradise, or the neoliberal era’s endless cheap commodities, white workers have always totten something material out of white supremacy. Each time they deal they get it’s a little worse, comparatively, than the earlier eras: lots of free land -> high wages -> cheap suburban land and home ownership -> life-improving consumer goods -> endless cheap plastic garbage. Now, what does white supremacy offer? Wages are stagnant. Good are getting less useful and more expensive. Housing is inaccessible. You can’t even go to the doctor anymore. Whiteness is, to a larger and larger segment of the population, purely a cultural signifier with less and less to show materially. (Obviously white people are still economically way better off than racialized people, but well off enough to uphold this system?)
And that takes us to the superstructure. While a big chunk of the US remains irredeemably racist psychopaths, it’s a lot less than it used to be. Anti-racism in the broadest sense is as close to culturally hegemonic as it’s ever been. It’s tough to measure this, but if we take Trump’s approval polling as roughly analogous to openly racist worldview, we’re down to a bit less than half of white people who buy in to white supremacy as the solution to their problems. And population dynamics continue to slowly move whiteness from majority towards plurality.
White supremacy is running out of juice, imo
Who wants sleep for dinner y’all? I’m serving up a heaping helping!!
My 3 tiny seroquel pills are now considered a balanced meal. Can’t be hungry if I’m sleeping like the dead.
shiiiiiiiit thats 3 meals a day right there! gonna be so healthy and full of life with such a balanced and nutritious lifestyle!
So will Americans eat even worse???
life finds a way
Deep fried butter in deep fried butter?
BRB having a stroke from eating nothing but Ramen for a week straight
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That tangent about GLP-1 users was wierd and unnecessary.
I don’t know of any other pharmaceutical class that has become so rapidly and widely stigmatized because of one of the conditions it treats.
Maybe typical (first gen) antipsychotics? Stimulants?
Setting aside the fact that GLP-1 drugs treat a ton of things other than obesity, what do the critics even want? Do they want people to lose weight or not? “Stop being fat. No! Not like that! Do something that doesn’t work!”
if fat people can look not fat by taking some medicine, then how will the virtuous (thin) people be able to tell who the sinners are?
bold to assume the hate is coming from the underweight mafia and not a representative sample of everyone with the protestant work ethic brainworms
some are temporarily embarrassed thin people, but that’s not the same as being like them
Gotta deflect somehow
Soda pop is $8 for a 12 pack peasant drink the slop
it must be something wrong with their Mindset
I used to always get a bag of chips at the store, but it’s now an unattainable luxury good
Grocers tripled the price of food and the feds cut SNAP
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
