Groceries 2024

[raisingarizona13]

As a working guy with very little disposable income buying groceries has been crushing us. It's seriously bullshit.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolsc...-so-expensive/

[J. Barron DeJong]

https://x.com/statisticurban/status/...sR_NcRK2VkCfkg

[Cisco Kid]

50/50 mix of tuna and cat food is palatable after a while.

[byates1]

Start stealing

[AmmergauerTele]

Pretty sure my salary hasn’t gone up 30+% under Biden Harris. Grocery visits for a family of four were in the low to mid $200s, now over $400. 30% my ass. My wife teaches 4th grade and got 2% this year. Not even close with keeping up with inflation. I do fondly remember refinancing at 2.25%, 2% inflation, blah, blah, blah….. I’ll be ok…..it’s my kids who are screwed.

[Buster Highmen]

Blame Biden/Harris for corporate gouging when the right wants less regulations.
Polly my ass.

From above link:
This is pressure from suppliers to increase prices. How? Professor Isabella Weber explains “that supply shocks allowed corporations to tacitly collude, hike prices, and rake in record profits…This is a form of implicit collusion,” she said. “Firms do not even need to talk to one another to know that a cost shock is a great time to raise prices.”

Alex Turnbull, a commodities analyst, echoes this, “When you go from 15 to 10 companies, not much changes. When you go from 10 to 6, a lot changes. But when you go from 6 to 4 – it’s a fix.”

And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.


Corporate profits as a share of the national income are at historic highs, while workers’ share is lower than before the pandemic. And labor shortages get a lot of media attention. Retail labor costs increased as food workers demanded better pay and benefits after getting stressed out, sick and even dying at work during the pandemic. But even if retail labor costs went up 50% across the board, this would result in price increases of just 5-10% at grocery stores, hardly justifying the price hikes in steaks, yogurt or hash browns.

[nickwm21]

Covid constrained supply on certain items while “most” kept their employment and income. It created an economy where some producers increased prices due to constraints and weren’t punished in sales - so all businesses increased prices whether there was an impact or not.

If you think who was in the white house had an effect on prices, you’re a fucking idiot.


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[old goat]

FTC is looking at food prices. Who knows if anything will come of it but FTC under Lina Khan and Biden has been more aggressive than it has been for decades--and taken immense shit for it. I hope Khan stays on.

[Bunion 2020]

Hmmm let's see. An article from 8 months ago?

Are prices still high? Yes.

Is it a political party or figures fault? No.

Can the President or Congress do much about high prices? History tends to say, no, not really.

[AmmergauerTele]

I generally prescribe to the free market will dictate prices. Wish I still lived in NH with Market Basket! Was it Albertson's or Kroger that swallowed up a ton of stores, can't remember.

[jono]

If we're prescribing markets we should probably define what we mean by "free," but I'll assume you mean purely competitive and not just whatever market happens to exist, since it's purely competitive markets that are known for efficiently setting prices.

As consolidation reduces competition the market becomes dramatically less free, ultimately a monopoly allows a single producer to set prices unilaterally. There's a whole study on how to maximize profits under that condition, and of course it's quite different from a competitive market.

We've had some pretty free markets but we used to defend them. They're only just now getting around to taking on Ticketbastard for anticompetitive practices. Let that sink in.

[Mazderati]

Are greedy companies to blame for grocery inflation? We looked at the data. 3-minute listen: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1...e-greedflation

FTC is looking at food prices. Who knows if anything will come of it but FTC under Lina Khan and Biden has been more aggressive than it has been for decades--and taken immense shit for it. I hope Khan stays on.

There are indications the current admin is not particularly fond of Khan, but her profile has grown such that removing her might be unpopular intraparty. Also hoping she remains in place.

[AmmergauerTele]

Regardless of how we got here I feel bad for folks. Am I going to be OK, yeah sure, and I feel lucky. There are lots of folks that it is really getting tight, and I feel for them!

[Mazderati]

Yes, to that and OP's point, it is a tangible increase regardless of reason.


Add grocery taxes to your list of voting issues if you are in a state that implements them. Shit should be illegal.

https://www.aarp.org/money/taxes/inf...groceries.html

[Thaleia]

Same deal here in Canada, prices are nuts. Things like chicken breast or many cheeses are basically luxury items at his point.

[nickwm21]

What bugs me is I don’t have a single store solution in my neighborhood:

- The mass market stores; QFC and Safeway; have decent veg quality at good prices, but terrible meat. Pantry items can be comically overpriced.

- Sprouts has great quality stuff and decent prices but selection can suck and it’s far far across town.

- Trader Joe’s is… Trader Joe’s. Great prices. Love it or hate it selection. Choosy veg and terrible meat.

-The Met is amazing but I can’t afford to shop there.

- Thriftway is not Thrifty at all.

….So that leaves Whole Foods… which seemed to be the most inflation proof in our area (surprisingly). Veg is priced right and good quality. The meat is great, but expensive… I should be eating less meat anyway. The problem is our local store is small so selection can suck so most of the time I have to stop by one of the others…


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[XXX-er]

I've definatly noticed higher prices but it hasn't changed spending choices for me, cuz 1 person who doesn't eat alot so the dollar amount is not that high

when i see stuff on sale I stock up, I don't know if everyone can afford to do that

eating out is pricey which I rarely do but the craft brews are onlya few blocks and they get a lot of my money

[SkiCougar]

both parties are to blame for food inflation, they both spend and spend more, been going on like that for decades; watch an old carson show, he was complaining about inflations and spending decades ago, nothing has changed; people better expect higher prices even from where we are now.

my regular weekly bread went up a dollar in the past month, would not be suprised it goes up another dollar in the next year.

[BCMtnHound]

A big shop in the city would cost us $300 5yrs ago. Big cost items were stuff like olive oil, cleaning and such household supplies, cheeses and some meat. We don’t eat a lot of processed food, so that helps. Now that same shop can be north of $600 depending on how aggressive we get on bulk sales. Luckily we have a cold room and a couple of chest deep freezes. Most our meat is either caught/hunted or direct from farm, which saves us tremendously.

Feds have taken the big grocers to task. There was a successful collusion case for bread a couple years ago. Top execs still claim no collusion or price gouging, while still recording record profits and huge exec bonuses. Wish they could be forced to live on a poverty line salary for a few months just to bring the fuckers back down the earth.

Too much money in the pyramid system, backed by nothing, coupled with world conflicts and climate change impacts, and I don’t see a fix in the near future. Grow what you can, support local producers, and consume less. Would suck to be urban with so few options though.

[Bunion 2020]

^^^ Meat, esp. Beef was insane when I was in Atlanta.

I have been buying beef in bulk, (1/4 of a cow) and it isn't that bad cause you already paid for it. I eat a lot less red meat anyway so probably not a bad thing and I have been going more and more meatless because I am sick of the same old stuff.

Here's to the proposed Kroger/Albertsons deal. That should help.
/S

[TBS]

I just finished updating our personal financials thru September
Thought I’d check out how much our monthly groceries and household items have increased.

Increase has been 28% - since 2018
We haven’t changed our consumption habits, except i started eating way fewer carbs in 2021 when I was diagnosed with diabetes. That added about 5%.

And we live in a high cost zone. Local grocer’s (Rays, aka Rapes) prices are about 30% higher than the Fred Meyer store 25 miles away - mostly due to the heavy tourist trade. So we make a weekly run to “the big city” and only fill in @ Rapes.

[raisingarizona13]

Start stealing

Items that won't scan easily may or may not have been falling into a bag before I can get it figured out. I'm not a thief in any way but if they are going to F us I can easily justify it to knock costs down a little. If I get called out on it I'll simply say that "well I never was trained for the check out position" and apologize.

[Buzzworthy]

Items that won't scan easily may or may not have been falling into a bag before I can get it figured out. I'm not a thief in any way but if they are going to F us I can easily justify it to knock costs down a little. If I get called out on it I'll simply say that "well I never was trained for the check out position" and apologize.

One of the dumbest things I’ve read here. You’re risking this for some cheese and crackers? Fucking stupid.

[Buzzworthy]

I was recently in a field with thousands of pounds of mature cannabis flower ready to harvest. I helped harvest all day and told my wife at the end of the day we all could have walked out with our pockets full of bud.

Her response: That’s not who you are.

[XXX-er]

Items that won't scan easily may or may not have been falling into a bag before I can get it figured out. I'm not a thief in any way but if they are going to F us I can easily justify it to knock costs down a little. If I get called out on it I'll simply say that "well I never was trained for the check out position" and apologize.

Actualy as oposed to just making a mistake you ^^ are stealing and there are cameras everywhere, the only way i would suggest this ^^ is if you have nothing because if you ain't got nothing you got nothing to lose, so my friend Bob sez

I will use the self scan if its all easy scanning but if I need to do vegies or anything I will have to look up I got to a checker which is usually a south azn dude

Running a scanner is not rocket science, if you have a probelem you are expected to ask for help, I was actulay trained to fix those things, food stores were a minefield of broken HW

as for the cheapest way to buy meat the safeway butcher I knew told me shopping the sales to stock up on the family packs was the cheapest way to buy meat so that what I do then I get a roll of freezer paper and wrap individual amounts