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I am upper middle class. A friend of mine, who is wealthier than I, were talking about being able to afford groceries. Not organic groceries, not special local

I am upper middle class. A friend of mine, who is wealthier than I, were talking about being able to afford groceries. Not organic groceries, not special local grass fed beef or anything silly like that. A family of four is paying about 1k a month in groceries to eat "reasonably" well. In that I am including things like dog food and detergent, but still this is a ridiculous number. Inflation, on paper, might be okay, but each week I find myself curtailing our grocery selection more and more, simply to maintain the budget at status quo. Inflation may be slowing, but it's still bad, and it is much worse for many more people than it is for me.

heartbreak 3y ago
I’m not sure what to make of this, but my 2012 weekly grocery budget for a family of two was $200. I can’t imagine trying to feed a family of four on $250 each week.
Gow8876 3y ago
My friends based in Singapore, roughly same criteria and food living standard as you described, about 2K sgd a month or 1.5K usd after exchange rate. This doesnt factor in car, housing, schooling, recreation, utility, and medical. And food are to some extend subsidized or indirectly price controlled by government (through market intervention by state-based companies). You had it better at 1K usd. At least, you can move to somewhere rural midwest and have your own farm. To do the same in Singapore, he will have to be multi-millionaire owning multi millions USD small plot the equivalent of a poor family home land area in suburb in 2nd or 3rd tier city in America. I am sure someone similar in NY or San Fra will be even worst. Again, at least they can run to somewhere cheap.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  Having your own farm is a fast track to poverty for most people, and your friends can always go to Thailand if they want to live cheaply.
- refurb 3y ago
  It’s wild what Singaporeans spend on food. Many people don’t prepare meals regularly at home. Kitchens are small and super basic. It’s pretty common to eat out for most meals. The plethora of options and low cost is obviously a big driver, but it’s getting hard to find meals for under $5 now. So 150 meals a month times $5 is $750 for food. And that’s eating super cheap. The more hearty hawker meals are more like $6-8. Of course not everyone eats every meal out and there are people that cook at home a lot (seems to be more common with Malay), but when this 25 year old colleague making $5,000 per month told me they spend $1,000 per month on meals I was surprised. When I was in the Bay Area our family of 4 spent $600 per month on food (all prepared at home). That was shopping at Costco and Asians markets and not really counting dollars while doing it.
jliptzin 3y ago
$250 per person per month for groceries is a lot?
nemo44x 3y ago
No idea why this is downvoted as it’s 100% true. Grocery prices have gone bonkers to the point I’ve asked my wife to really look at prices on certain things after coming home with a $10 loaf of bread. Even Costco - I’d fill a cart for $350-$400 and now it’s $600-$650. Things feel like they’ve stabilized but costs are extremely high. Something broke.
- CuriouslyC 3y ago
  I can fill a cart pretty full up with a mix of staples, frozen food and some snacks for ~$250-300 at costco, I'm guessing you're getting lobster tails, expensive wine and other pricey items.
- mulderc 3y ago
  I don’t know what the hell you are buying but my and my partner eat well and never get anywhere near that number.
- tekla 3y ago
  What the fuck are you buying. Thats more money than my family of 4 spends
- hindsightbias 3y ago
  “Net sales for the 17-week fourth quarter were $77.43 billion, an increase of 9.4 percent from $70.76 billion in the 16-week fourth quarter last year. Net sales for the 53-week fiscal year were $237.71 billion, an increase of 6.7 percent from $222.73 billion in the 52-week fiscal year of 2022.” This anti-capitalism has got to stop.
- D13Fd 3y ago
  Huh? With a family of 7, in a relatively upscale area, we usually hit around $300, and rarely get $400. What are you buying?
diogenescynic 3y ago
I have 2 kids under 4 so we still need diapers and wipes and our grocery costs feel insane... we regularly spend $1200 to $1600 or more per month in California.
- Dopameaner 3y ago
  Echo the same, My personal conspiracy is these category of articles are election propaganda.
- D13Fd 3y ago
  Order diapers and wipes online in bulk!
  - diogenescynic 3y ago
    We buy them at Costco, which is the cheapest I've found.
Spooky23 3y ago
People are pretty ignorant of costs. One of my coworkers bitches about this, but uses instacart for alot of shopping and buys dopey shit like pre-cut carrots. The pandemic taught retailers that they can increase margins and people are too lazy to shop. I bought a container of strawberries for about half the cost of the local supermarket chain at Aldi. Beef is about 30% less at warehouse clubs. Those price differences are just margin, and people tag on more with delivery services, and blame the economy for their own stupidity.
- kortilla 3y ago
  It doesn’t matter why the price went up if it’s going up on average. Inflation is inflation no matter the source of the price.
  - Spooky23 3y ago
    If you choose a $10 commodity vs an equivalent $5 commodity, that’s not inflation. If you pay someone to fetch and deliver a commodity, that’s not commodity inflation.
    - kortilla 3y ago
      If all of the grocery stores collude to raise the price of milk, that’s inflation. It doesn’t matter if it was because of input costs or a desire to expand margins. The popularity of Instacart has not grown enough to account for inflation. That’s just grasping at straws to blame people and bury your head in the sand. I never use delivery services and my grocery prices have gone up 50%. There is more money chasing fewer goods. It’s simple supply and demand. Only idiots get hung up arguing if middlemen are to blame for price increases. If supply was adequate, it wouldn’t be possible for grocery stores to raise prices.
mulderc 3y ago
I’m super skeptical on these numbers as me and my partner are nowhere near $250 a month per person and don’t do any budgeting or restrictions when we are at the expensive grocery stores in our town.
- Izkata 3y ago
  Here's another then: I'm one person with no pets who has spent an average of $430 per month at the grocery store in 2023. And almost all of that is food, I get most non-food consumables from Amazon subscriptions. In 2019 it was around $250 per month. Pretty much the same set of items. (This is in Chicago)
  - mulderc 3y ago
    So prices went up and you didn’t change what you get? I guess people are much less price elastic than I am. We are well under $200 a month and I don’t feel like we do anything special to keep our costs down.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      I usually don't add to these conversations because my salary is high enough I don't need to pay attention and people love jumping on that. But I think here it ends up with a good comparison point.
  - mulderc 3y ago
    We also make a high enough income where we don’t really think much at all about grocery prices but have no issue spending way below $200 a month without thinking about it. This is why I am confused by these stories. Sure I grab the thing on sale instead of the expensive thing when I notice but it doesn’t seem that hard to stay under $200 a person.
    - candybar 3y ago
      How are you defining groceries here? I suspect that some people are being fairly expansive and including everything that they'd buy at a grocery store, while others are being much more restrictive. Using a more expansive definition (mostly because I've literally broken things down by items), we're close to $500 per person, the few times I've spot-checked our spending. I think it's difficult to be well-below $200 per person without being highly budget-conscious, avoiding expensive categories altogether and/or eating out all the time.
_8j50 3y ago
I am really trying to avoid commenting on HN but your math makes little sense. Even 10-15 years ago, $5/meal was more than reasonable to eat well. For a just a 2 adult household, that is $15/day and $450/mo. What I was paying eating cheap fastfood and making ~10/hr pre-2015 was twice that. Just last year, trying to live strictly off of delivery apps like doordash and ubereats as a single person I could barely crack 1200/mo. 1k/mo is 12000/yr. 2k/mo rent for a 3 bedroom is 24k/yr. Being able to pay groceries and rent on $36k/yr only for that isn't so bad. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to ruin anyone's plans to live a better life, but when someone says "the economy is great", that's relative to post-covid and two multi-decade wars the US fought and a global recession not even two decades old. I almost want to beg and plead people to realize the amazingly prosperous times they live in. The great depression and grear famines were not so long ago. The dust bowl can still come back. Multiple wars at the same time at a global scale is still a very much impending realistic possibility. Another war in th middle east is brewing. A dictator wanna be is being nominated in the US for president. Appreciate what you have so you can fight to keep it! Things can get much better but also much worse. We must be sober minded in fighting for a better future without forgetting what we have. There has never been a more prosperous time and place to be alive in the history of mankind than now in America, especially when you consider the marvels of medicine and technology available today. Again, things could be much better on many fronts, but what good is that fight if what little you enjoy now is gone? Things like being most prosperous and powerful country and the center of tech and medicine don't tend to come back once they are gone for a country if you look at history. Maybe we need to celebrate thanksgiving more than once a year?
- ajross 3y ago
  > when someone says "the economy is great", that's relative to post-covid and two multi-decade wars the US fought and a global recession not even two decades old. No? It's relative to pretty much all of 20th/21st century data. Can you point to some numbers that you think tell a different story? We are vastly wealthier than our grandparents. Real[1] median household income is 50% higher today than in the 80's. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N It's down a little (like 5%) across the pandemic, which is what everyone seems to be freaking out about. But that correction is behind us now and things are looking good again, which is causing a somewhat counter-intuitive anti-anti-freakout a-la your comment. Which is what the linked article is about. Cheer up, basically. You've been fooled by the discourse into believing things that aren't true. [1] Where "real" means "inflation-adjusted"
kortilla 3y ago
Inflation can stop but that won’t undo the damage. Unless we get deflation (very rare), it will never drop below 1k for you again.
- bruce511 3y ago
  Firstly you -really- don't want deflation. That'll kill an economy real quick. Second, we get deflation of specific goods all the time. Electronics and solar equipment are the poster child for this. An Apple 2 cost a lot more than my most recent machine. Thirdly, wages rise to compensate with inflation. Ask your grandfather what their first car cost. Then ask them about their first salary check. I get that people get antsy when they see prices go up. I get that a combination of increased demand and constrained supply both work to increase specific things (housing in SF). I get that your employer may not be increasing wages to match inflation. I get that people on fixed income pensions feel inflation a lot. (Let their pain be your education; don't use fixed income products as your retirement plan.) But equally don't use a word like "damage" here. There's no damage. The price of goods is always in flux, and always the result of many different interlocking numbers. I understand that to folks who have grown up in zero-inflation environment that this can seem scary. But, from one who has lived my whole life in a single-digit inflation environment, its not scary. You just get/give a wage bump each year to compensate. And yeah, I get that US employers are profit hungry and less inclined to pay living wages. If you're starting a business I heartily suggest you build inflation into your wage bill .
  - Ferret7446 3y ago
    > Firstly you -really- don't want deflation. That'll kill an economy real quick. Everyone repeats that as mantra but I think that should be challenged. I find it doubtful that inflation is needed to encourage spending or investment. Currency inflates naturally (that is, loses value) because it is not inherently useful, and things you can exchange for it are more useful today than they are tomorrow. You won't skip buying a burger today to buy two burgers next year if you're going to starve. And even for luxuries, they are worth more today than next year, because lifespans are limited.
ajross 3y ago
> A family of four is paying about 1k a month in groceries to eat "reasonably" well. How much exactly should a family of four pay to eat "reasonably" well, in your estimation. That number comes to about 17% of median household income. Is 17% too much to pay for food? What's the right number? It sounds glib, but it's a serious question. What you've done here is cherry pick a specific expense that rose faster than inflation, and tried to draw a global conclusion directly through that outlier! I mean, what if you and your upper middle class friend were talking about flat panel TV prices? Would you have concluded the economy was great?
- twoodfin 3y ago
  $12,000 isn’t 1.4% of median household income, unless median household income is north of $850,000.
  - ajross 3y ago
    Indeed, I misread; corrected. The same question pertains though. Is that too much for food? It doesn't seem like too much for food. People don't really spend that much on groceries relative to other expenses.
- mcphage 3y ago
  > I mean, what if you and your upper middle class friend were talking about flat panel TV prices? Would you have concluded the economy was great? Maybe if you buy a flat panel tv every month, you’d think it was?
  - ajross 3y ago
    To be clear: I was picking another outlier. In fact most american households spend rather more on personal electronics and gadgetry (not just TVs, obviously) than they do on food. Yet no one is dancing in the streets about the amazing windfall of cheap Foxconn-produced devices, because we all recognize that one market is an outlier and that the economy as a whole doesn't look that great. I'm just pointing out that freaking out about food prices is the same kind of cherry picking.
Waterluvian 3y ago
I think a lot of people buy into their “class” according to their income and so they’re no more financially secure than those making less with smaller debt obligations. A number of my peers have homes worth 2-5x mine and they’re really struggling. Which just feels bizarre given they’re making very good money.
xboxnolifes 3y ago
That number seems... normal? $250 a month per person for food and house goods seems incredibly regular.

heartbreak 3y ago

I’m not sure what to make of this, but my 2012 weekly grocery budget for a family of two was $200. I can’t imagine trying to feed a family of four on $250 each week.

Gow8876 3y ago

My friends based in Singapore, roughly same criteria and food living standard as you described, about 2K sgd a month or 1.5K usd after exchange rate. This doesnt factor in car, housing, schooling, recreation, utility, and medical. And food are to some extend subsidized or indirectly price controlled by government (through market intervention by state-based companies). You had it better at 1K usd. At least, you can move to somewhere rural midwest and have your own farm. To do the same in Singapore, he will have to be multi-millionaire owning multi millions USD small plot the equivalent of a poor family home land area in suburb in 2nd or 3rd tier city in America. I am sure someone similar in NY or San Fra will be even worst. Again, at least they can run to somewhere cheap.

CuriouslyC 3y ago
Having your own farm is a fast track to poverty for most people, and your friends can always go to Thailand if they want to live cheaply.
refurb 3y ago
It’s wild what Singaporeans spend on food. Many people don’t prepare meals regularly at home. Kitchens are small and super basic. It’s pretty common to eat out for most meals. The plethora of options and low cost is obviously a big driver, but it’s getting hard to find meals for under $5 now. So 150 meals a month times $5 is $750 for food. And that’s eating super cheap. The more hearty hawker meals are more like $6-8. Of course not everyone eats every meal out and there are people that cook at home a lot (seems to be more common with Malay), but when this 25 year old colleague making $5,000 per month told me they spend $1,000 per month on meals I was surprised. When I was in the Bay Area our family of 4 spent $600 per month on food (all prepared at home). That was shopping at Costco and Asians markets and not really counting dollars while doing it.

jliptzin 3y ago

$250 per person per month for groceries is a lot?

nemo44x 3y ago

No idea why this is downvoted as it’s 100% true. Grocery prices have gone bonkers to the point I’ve asked my wife to really look at prices on certain things after coming home with a $10 loaf of bread. Even Costco - I’d fill a cart for $350-$400 and now it’s $600-$650. Things feel like they’ve stabilized but costs are extremely high. Something broke.

CuriouslyC 3y ago
I can fill a cart pretty full up with a mix of staples, frozen food and some snacks for ~$250-300 at costco, I'm guessing you're getting lobster tails, expensive wine and other pricey items.
mulderc 3y ago
I don’t know what the hell you are buying but my and my partner eat well and never get anywhere near that number.
tekla 3y ago
What the fuck are you buying. Thats more money than my family of 4 spends
hindsightbias 3y ago
“Net sales for the 17-week fourth quarter were $77.43 billion, an increase of 9.4 percent from $70.76 billion in the 16-week fourth quarter last year. Net sales for the 53-week fiscal year were $237.71 billion, an increase of 6.7 percent from $222.73 billion in the 52-week fiscal year of 2022.” This anti-capitalism has got to stop.
D13Fd 3y ago
Huh? With a family of 7, in a relatively upscale area, we usually hit around $300, and rarely get $400. What are you buying?

diogenescynic 3y ago

I have 2 kids under 4 so we still need diapers and wipes and our grocery costs feel insane... we regularly spend $1200 to $1600 or more per month in California.

Dopameaner 3y ago
Echo the same, My personal conspiracy is these category of articles are election propaganda.
D13Fd 3y ago
Order diapers and wipes online in bulk!
- diogenescynic 3y ago
  We buy them at Costco, which is the cheapest I've found.

Spooky23 3y ago

People are pretty ignorant of costs. One of my coworkers bitches about this, but uses instacart for alot of shopping and buys dopey shit like pre-cut carrots. The pandemic taught retailers that they can increase margins and people are too lazy to shop. I bought a container of strawberries for about half the cost of the local supermarket chain at Aldi. Beef is about 30% less at warehouse clubs. Those price differences are just margin, and people tag on more with delivery services, and blame the economy for their own stupidity.

kortilla 3y ago
It doesn’t matter why the price went up if it’s going up on average. Inflation is inflation no matter the source of the price.
- Spooky23 3y ago
  If you choose a $10 commodity vs an equivalent $5 commodity, that’s not inflation. If you pay someone to fetch and deliver a commodity, that’s not commodity inflation.
  - kortilla 3y ago
    If all of the grocery stores collude to raise the price of milk, that’s inflation. It doesn’t matter if it was because of input costs or a desire to expand margins. The popularity of Instacart has not grown enough to account for inflation. That’s just grasping at straws to blame people and bury your head in the sand. I never use delivery services and my grocery prices have gone up 50%. There is more money chasing fewer goods. It’s simple supply and demand. Only idiots get hung up arguing if middlemen are to blame for price increases. If supply was adequate, it wouldn’t be possible for grocery stores to raise prices.

mulderc 3y ago

I’m super skeptical on these numbers as me and my partner are nowhere near $250 a month per person and don’t do any budgeting or restrictions when we are at the expensive grocery stores in our town.

Izkata 3y ago
Here's another then: I'm one person with no pets who has spent an average of $430 per month at the grocery store in 2023. And almost all of that is food, I get most non-food consumables from Amazon subscriptions. In 2019 it was around $250 per month. Pretty much the same set of items. (This is in Chicago)
- mulderc 3y ago
  So prices went up and you didn’t change what you get? I guess people are much less price elastic than I am. We are well under $200 a month and I don’t feel like we do anything special to keep our costs down.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    I usually don't add to these conversations because my salary is high enough I don't need to pay attention and people love jumping on that. But I think here it ends up with a good comparison point.
- mulderc 3y ago
  We also make a high enough income where we don’t really think much at all about grocery prices but have no issue spending way below $200 a month without thinking about it. This is why I am confused by these stories. Sure I grab the thing on sale instead of the expensive thing when I notice but it doesn’t seem that hard to stay under $200 a person.
  - candybar 3y ago
    How are you defining groceries here? I suspect that some people are being fairly expansive and including everything that they'd buy at a grocery store, while others are being much more restrictive. Using a more expansive definition (mostly because I've literally broken things down by items), we're close to $500 per person, the few times I've spot-checked our spending. I think it's difficult to be well-below $200 per person without being highly budget-conscious, avoiding expensive categories altogether and/or eating out all the time.

_8j50 3y ago

I am really trying to avoid commenting on HN but your math makes little sense. Even 10-15 years ago, $5/meal was more than reasonable to eat well. For a just a 2 adult household, that is $15/day and $450/mo. What I was paying eating cheap fastfood and making ~10/hr pre-2015 was twice that. Just last year, trying to live strictly off of delivery apps like doordash and ubereats as a single person I could barely crack 1200/mo. 1k/mo is 12000/yr. 2k/mo rent for a 3 bedroom is 24k/yr. Being able to pay groceries and rent on $36k/yr only for that isn't so bad. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to ruin anyone's plans to live a better life, but when someone says "the economy is great", that's relative to post-covid and two multi-decade wars the US fought and a global recession not even two decades old. I almost want to beg and plead people to realize the amazingly prosperous times they live in. The great depression and grear famines were not so long ago. The dust bowl can still come back. Multiple wars at the same time at a global scale is still a very much impending realistic possibility. Another war in th middle east is brewing. A dictator wanna be is being nominated in the US for president. Appreciate what you have so you can fight to keep it! Things can get much better but also much worse. We must be sober minded in fighting for a better future without forgetting what we have. There has never been a more prosperous time and place to be alive in the history of mankind than now in America, especially when you consider the marvels of medicine and technology available today. Again, things could be much better on many fronts, but what good is that fight if what little you enjoy now is gone? Things like being most prosperous and powerful country and the center of tech and medicine don't tend to come back once they are gone for a country if you look at history. Maybe we need to celebrate thanksgiving more than once a year?

ajross 3y ago
> when someone says "the economy is great", that's relative to post-covid and two multi-decade wars the US fought and a global recession not even two decades old. No? It's relative to pretty much all of 20th/21st century data. Can you point to some numbers that you think tell a different story? We are vastly wealthier than our grandparents. Real[1] median household income is 50% higher today than in the 80's. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N It's down a little (like 5%) across the pandemic, which is what everyone seems to be freaking out about. But that correction is behind us now and things are looking good again, which is causing a somewhat counter-intuitive anti-anti-freakout a-la your comment. Which is what the linked article is about. Cheer up, basically. You've been fooled by the discourse into believing things that aren't true. [1] Where "real" means "inflation-adjusted"

kortilla 3y ago

Inflation can stop but that won’t undo the damage. Unless we get deflation (very rare), it will never drop below 1k for you again.

bruce511 3y ago
Firstly you -really- don't want deflation. That'll kill an economy real quick. Second, we get deflation of specific goods all the time. Electronics and solar equipment are the poster child for this. An Apple 2 cost a lot more than my most recent machine. Thirdly, wages rise to compensate with inflation. Ask your grandfather what their first car cost. Then ask them about their first salary check. I get that people get antsy when they see prices go up. I get that a combination of increased demand and constrained supply both work to increase specific things (housing in SF). I get that your employer may not be increasing wages to match inflation. I get that people on fixed income pensions feel inflation a lot. (Let their pain be your education; don't use fixed income products as your retirement plan.) But equally don't use a word like "damage" here. There's no damage. The price of goods is always in flux, and always the result of many different interlocking numbers. I understand that to folks who have grown up in zero-inflation environment that this can seem scary. But, from one who has lived my whole life in a single-digit inflation environment, its not scary. You just get/give a wage bump each year to compensate. And yeah, I get that US employers are profit hungry and less inclined to pay living wages. If you're starting a business I heartily suggest you build inflation into your wage bill .
- Ferret7446 3y ago
  > Firstly you -really- don't want deflation. That'll kill an economy real quick. Everyone repeats that as mantra but I think that should be challenged. I find it doubtful that inflation is needed to encourage spending or investment. Currency inflates naturally (that is, loses value) because it is not inherently useful, and things you can exchange for it are more useful today than they are tomorrow. You won't skip buying a burger today to buy two burgers next year if you're going to starve. And even for luxuries, they are worth more today than next year, because lifespans are limited.

ajross 3y ago

> A family of four is paying about 1k a month in groceries to eat "reasonably" well. How much exactly should a family of four pay to eat "reasonably" well, in your estimation. That number comes to about 17% of median household income. Is 17% too much to pay for food? What's the right number? It sounds glib, but it's a serious question. What you've done here is cherry pick a specific expense that rose faster than inflation, and tried to draw a global conclusion directly through that outlier! I mean, what if you and your upper middle class friend were talking about flat panel TV prices? Would you have concluded the economy was great?

twoodfin 3y ago
$12,000 isn’t 1.4% of median household income, unless median household income is north of $850,000.
- ajross 3y ago
  Indeed, I misread; corrected. The same question pertains though. Is that too much for food? It doesn't seem like too much for food. People don't really spend that much on groceries relative to other expenses.
mcphage 3y ago
> I mean, what if you and your upper middle class friend were talking about flat panel TV prices? Would you have concluded the economy was great? Maybe if you buy a flat panel tv every month, you’d think it was?
- ajross 3y ago
  To be clear: I was picking another outlier. In fact most american households spend rather more on personal electronics and gadgetry (not just TVs, obviously) than they do on food. Yet no one is dancing in the streets about the amazing windfall of cheap Foxconn-produced devices, because we all recognize that one market is an outlier and that the economy as a whole doesn't look that great. I'm just pointing out that freaking out about food prices is the same kind of cherry picking.

Waterluvian 3y ago

I think a lot of people buy into their “class” according to their income and so they’re no more financially secure than those making less with smaller debt obligations. A number of my peers have homes worth 2-5x mine and they’re really struggling. Which just feels bizarre given they’re making very good money.

xboxnolifes 3y ago

That number seems... normal? $250 a month per person for food and house goods seems incredibly regular.