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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 lea
by Avicebron 3mo 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 3mo agoProbably 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.
- nvme0n1p1 3mo agoConsumers are the last group I would blame. https://www.usda.gov/about-food/food-safety/food-loss-and-waste/food-waste-faqs 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.
- qdotme 3mo ago1.5lb / day? I'd wager it's quite equally in thirds, would love to see the data. I'd believe 0.5lbs/day/person in my household - cook enough for everyone to have seconds, but most of the time it's tossed (sometimes after some time spent in the fridge/freezer hoping for a reheat); stuff bought but inedible (chicken bones, etc).. I'd believe similar in the distribution pipeline (just look at how much stuff are in the discounted aisle just about to fall off sell-by date + obviously moldy goods), and I'd believe similar in the production pipeline.
- reactordev 3mo agoNo food gets thrown out in my house. We have trash from plastic and paper but food is consumed, by somebody. If it hits the expiration date then it’s today’s quick meal or dog food. I try not to throw away anything that is edible.
- apercu 3mo agoOr composted to feed my garden. I hardly throw out any garbage.
- qdotme 3mo agoProbably was that way before we got married and had a kid. And before our dog started getting older and we needed to watch what she eats. Now the notion of "cook fresh every day" is a thing (rather than reheats), we try to do keep leftovers but eventually we run out of space for them.
- reactordev 3mo agoabsolutely. Cooking smaller meals for the family to ensure it's all eaten or having no-cook alternatives for afterwards (hello graham crackers!) if you're still hungry. Normally I try my best to portion for who's going to eat. If I'm cooking for myself, its usually a one-pan meal.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- jandrewrogers 3mo agoThat "waste" is almost certainly excess production that can't find a market + spoilage. It is entirely normal for farmers to literally dump their crops in these cases. Everyone in the supply chain does it to some extent. Lack of market and spoilage makes it unavoidable. When I lived in farming communities there were massive piles where people dumped excess crops.
- hadlock 3mo agoWhen 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 blueberries a week for six months, but surprise, they hate them now! I can't count the number of half-full glasses of milk I've found in the last month, probably averaging 1 per day. Kids are extremely inefficient eaters unless it is covered in sugar or chocolate.
- apercu 3mo agoBuy frozen fruit?
- entropyie 3mo agoI have two kids and this is pure bollox. They'll eat what they are given if they are hungry enough. Or eat the leftovers yourself. Cook the fruit and make compote. We never throw out edible food, virtually zero waste. Just make an effort.
- irishcoffee 3mo agoSame here, 3 kids, we don’t waste food. As an aside, we’re all slender. We just figured out how much of what to buy each week, plan our meals, etc. I also personally like eating leftovers for both breakfast and a packed lunch, which probably helps a bit.
- disgruntledphd2 3mo ago> I also personally like eating leftovers for both breakfast and a packed lunch, which probably helps a bit. That definitely helps, I'm pretty bad at eating leftovers unless I put them in a new meal so we end up with more food waste than necessary. Kids completely changing what they'll eat on a weekly basis also has a pretty large impact.
- billfor 3mo agoThey should just lead with saying that obesity rates have tripled since the 1960s and maybe they will start declining a bit now.
- estearum 3mo agoVery 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.
- nvme0n1p1 3mo agoObesity is inversely correlated with income. https://www.statista.com/statistics/237141/us-obesity-by-annual-income/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/237141/us-obesity-by-ann...
- estearum 3mo agoCorrect.
- the_real_cher 3mo agoi think they were being sarcastic with a very valid point ;)
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- xnx 3mo agoCheap GLP-1's will probably finally bend this curve for lower incomes. Muscle-mass (via paid meds) will be the new marker of wealth/status for upper incomes.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dyauspitr 3mo agoMeat is like $30/lb. What a joke, I see almost no one at the butcher counter in grocery stores anymore.
- saltcured 3mo agoOne 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 3mo agoAFAIU, 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.
- fluidcruft 3mo agoThere's also a screwworm outbreak going on.
- irishcoffee 3mo agoWe 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.
- indoorfish 3mo ago$7.35/lb where I am with a $600 deposit. It ends up being about $2k all things considered. It may even out, but a lot of folks don't have that kind of money around, ~5% of a yearly salary isn't nothing for a lot of people. I completely forgot about needing a chest freezer and space for a chest freezer..that's also not nothing.
- cm2012 3mo agoThis 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_avocado 3mo agoEverything 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.
- reliabilityguy 3mo agoWhere are you located? I think even NYCs groceries are not that expensive.
- darth_avocado 3mo agoSF Bay Area. I will say that these are not Costco prices or a store where I’d be couponing, but it’s not Whole Foods either. I would love to go to Costco but unfortunately I do not have the space to accommodate the bulk quantities that I’d have to buy and consume.
- adelie 3mo agohi! i live in SF. at trader joe's, these items would be priced at - $5 (bread loaf) + $5 (eggs) + $3 (yogurt) + $2 (onions) + $2 (tomatoes) + $1 (jalapeno) + $3 (parsley) = $21. i'm rounding up on eggs and bread since you might be buying a more expensive variety, and guesstimating parsley because i haven't bought it from trader joe's before. everything else is pulled from my last few shopping trips. if you're spending $50 on this, i would highly recommend finding a new grocery store.
- dieselgate 3mo agoIt seems inflated roughly 40% to prove a point but regardless stuff is still too expensive and I don’t eat meat. Don’t know though yesterday was reading some comments here about people literally saying “$50k income a month in SF and you still can’t buy a house,” stuff like that is ridiculously out of touch.
- inigyou 3mo agoBy 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 3mo agoWe 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?).
- grebc 3mo agoSome people think society owes them.
- _DeadFred_ 3mo agoYes, society owes a social contract where if you work you can afford to live and have a roof over your head, food to eat, and clothes that aren't Temu plastic rags of worse quality than dystopian sci-fi fiction 'clothes issued to people on basic'.
- ndsipa_pomu 3mo agoThat's so true - the land-owning class believe that society should continue paying them lots of money if that land is to be put to use. Don't get me started on landlords and their passive income requirements.
- inigyou 3mo agoIndentured servants agreed to be indentured servants. At gunpoint. It's literally illegal not to pay rent. They will put you in jail if you don't sign a rental contract. Consent under duress is not consent.
- BearOso 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agoBain 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 3mo agoCan'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 3mo agoI 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.
- halJordan 3mo agoIt's definitely a reported phenomenon that glp-1 inhibitors are crashing junk food sales. They're also not bleeding edge vanity drugs. Something like a third of Americans are on a glp-1 inhibitor and they're well covered by insurance.
- bmitc 3mo agoWages 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.