> Real total food spending increased 11.4 percent in 2021 and 3.4 percent in 2022, driven by higher FAFH spending (up 19 percent in 2021 and 8 percent in 2022). Real FAH spending increased by 4 percent in 2021 but decreased by 2 percent in 2022.
FAH = food at home
FAFH = food away from home
So, eating out is killing our wallets. Not really a surprise considering "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6 and a halfway decent lunch is upwards of $17-20.
It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.
>So, eating out is killing our wallets. Not really a surprise considering "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6 and a halfway decent lunch is upwards of $17-20.
Yea, it's crazy what eating out costs, and what having that same food delivered costs. It's damn convenient though.
>It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.
I just bought stuff to make chicken quesadillas. It cost about $9 and I'll probably make at least 8 of them and have some chicken and tortilla left over after that. I can afford to eat out, but it seems like a ripoff and I just don't like getting ripped off.
Towards the end of 2021, I began cooking at home and bringing my lunch to save money. My wife and I used to eat out a lot, and I would usually buy lunch. Cooking food resulted in close to 600-$700 in savings per month. Also, cooking for myself also resulted in me eating healthier (due to me being lazy and opting for simple dishes such as cooking chicken in butter and steaming vegetables) and I ended up losing close to 40lbs over the span of a few months.
One detail here: Up 19 percent in 2021 - remember that any number from that year is comparing to the low baseline from the pandemic shutdowns in 2020, so the real effect isn't as big as it looks from that.
To see the real numbers, look at the annualized differential between 2019 and 2023.
Constant out-of-home dinning isn't sustainable anyway, unless you massively underpay the staff, which isn't possible when unemployment is low. Hope everyone knows how to cook, at least a little bit. I don't know that we're going back.
Cooking at home means going to the supermarket (or going online and ordering from the SM). If you have to cook for more than yourself, then you probably need to also put sometime into planning the meals for the week. And then of course there's the time to cook the meals. There's also cleanup. Also, let's not forget that there are plenty of people who never really learned to cook and now fear the kitchen.
Sure meals from the frozen section are an option but they're maybe only slightly less expensive than FAFH.
In any case, FAH takes time *and* effort. Perhaps not a lot of time + effort - and habit - but enough to make it easy to say, "F** it. Let's FAFH..."
If FAFH establishments start closing, local towns are going to turn into ghosts towns. FAFH is about the only thing left in a lot of cases; aside from web dispensaries.
People should have been FAH'ing long ago for health reasons and that obviously didn't workout at all.
I never eat out. I can tell you that food bought from grocery stores and farmers markets has gone up in price by 1/3 to 1/2 from Dec 2019. And some foods disappeared never to return during the start of the pandemic.
Eating at home is going to save you money compared to eating out. But eating at home costs have gone up a shocking amount as well.
> I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it.
We can hope, but it seems unlikely to me that it would go quite like that. I'm pretty sure that once people are used to budgeting a larger share of their income on food, processed food companies and their retailers will happily soak up whatever gets trimmed from restaurant spending. There might be a net savings for those early to transition, but if it becomes a cultural trend, supermarket prices will just creep up to match the customary food budget.
Restaurants may lose, but food manufacturers and supermarkets will likely claw back the difference before they let it go back to families.
I think this has a lot to do with the under counting of inflation. If you go back to 80s methodology inflation has been much larger that what they've let on.
Yup. I think there's also an ongoing century long shift in "modern" culture that makes classical economics food "baskets" unrepresentative. Excepting wellness geeks, nobody who participates in "modern" culture lives on classical staples of grains, produce, dairy, and affordable cuts of meat.
As a hardline economist in academia, you can say that those are what matter to poverty or starvation because people will eventually become desperate enough to reject their lived culture and return to an alien world of basic foods, but policy makers need to be realistic and acknowledge that most people have no idea how to eat without branded processed foods, fast food convenience, etc. The cultural traditions that made simple foods practical have been lost from many families and those never-learned recipes and habits don't just restore themselves to people overnight when times get tough.
That inconvenient reality of what people actually eat needs to get folded into these economic models for them to actually report on what they intend to. Otherwise, the measures just speaking to a lost time and the smattering of rustic immigrants who still know how to live satisfyingly on traditional staples.
I am not familiar with the methodology of reporting inflation used in the 80s - did they take a wider basket of goods, or were there other consumer purchases in question that would affect the reporting number? If we were to use the 80s methodology - what would inflation numbers look like?
I no longer do a double take at a sandwich costing $25 at takeout restaurants in the area where I live. 10 years ago, I would have been surprised to see a sandwich cost $15 at anywhere but an upscale restaurant.
If this is under counting inflation then spending at restaurants is up even more. I guess people have money to spend and are enjoying the restaurant scene.
Before the doomers run away with this thread, real spending on food prepared at home is down. This is more than off set by increased spending at restaurants. This returns to the pre-covid trends.
This is technically correct ("the best kind of correct!"), but the upward march of that inflation-adjusted trend graph is pretty clear. I'm not a doomer, just trying to be even-handed.
I'd love to see a better understanding of why American HN commenters, a cohort that likely makes 2-3x the typical compensation of an ordinary American, wants to catatastrophize a pretty decent to great American economy.
The comments are literally data being "refuted" with anecdotes.
We use a basket of goods to measure inflation. There is endless debate about whether the basket is representative, but it is almost certainly more representative than just "eggs and meat".
I have been fascinated by the price of oats recently. The 8lb box of oats I have been buying from Amazon for several years suddenly went from $15 to $32 in July. Paying $4/lb for grain feels excessive given that meat is cheaper than that in most of the country. I went looking for an explanation expecting there to been some huge crop loss, but found oat future prices have been relatively stable at around $0.15/lb. I looked at other prices, and whole foods even charges $3.6/lb for their store brand and something like $2.5/lb for bulk goods. I distinctly remember buying the same bulk oats for $0.59/lb in 2017, right around the time Amazon bought whole foods. And oat futures prices are only up about 30% since then.
I think retailers would like us to believe these increases are just them passing through rising commodity prices from inflation, but I am increasingly convinced it is collusion, either implicit or explicit, to increase margins. The most compelling evidence this is happening seems to be Costco, which generally sets its prices at near-fixed 15% markup hasn't experienced nearly the same increases and is selling similar products at less than half of that price.
I think the entire thing is indicative of a growing disconnect between the cost of commodities and what consumers are paying due to increased consolidation and collusion among retailers.
This may be due to how Amazon's "stock" works. Was it for sale by Amazon or a 3rd party?
I have a(n unsupported) theory that gung-ho retailers try out amazon from time to time, in an effort to expand. Maybe they hire someone who knows how to sell there. They price based on how they do in store, then after a few months do a reconciliation and realize how much money they lose due to amazon's ads/stocking/shipping costs. Then they raise prices.
Each time this happens, you see massive fluctuations upwards as they have to cover their cost + amazon's charges. Then a competitor gets a new ecomm/marketing/growth person who sees an "opportunity" because all the competition has priced things way too high. That person pitches leadership on how they can sell more items without much more effort ("thanks Jeff Bezos!"), but the actual understanding of how much it costs doesn't come until a couple of months later.
It also doesn't really make any sense to buy a cheap pantry staple or cereal grain like oats online and have it shipped to you. The base product is so cheap but it's heavy so traditional consumer shipping is expensive (and wasteful/bad for the environment).
There's a very good chance much of that price increase is due to increase cost of shipping. Even if Amazon gives you "free" shipping - they're building that price into the price of the product... They're not eating the shipping cost on a low margin item like a cereal grain.
I can buy organic locally grown oats at my expensive local health food co-op for less than $2/lb...unchanged from years ago.
Amazon pricing is not a reliable source of changes in cost of goods sold, especially if not shipped and sold by Amazon. Plus you are pricing in home delivery.
I would use a retailer known to keep margins as low as possible like Costco as a better gauge. I buy rolled oats all the time, and between Costco and Trader Joe’s, I have not noticed any pricing swings in oats.
Don't put too much stock in just one Amazon listing. That doesn't reflect reality. Amazon listings fluctuate in price all the time. Maybe some algorithm decided to bump that one listing in hopes that regular orderers would keep buying it out of inertia.
Monopolization in the food industry (at just about every level) has set the stage for unchecked corporate profiteering. The real shortages during the pandemic created a pretext for ongoing gouging. Federal authorities used to intervene with various forms of price controls and limits on this kind of stuff, but now they simply wash their hands of the whole thing. This is of course all in the context of the US engaging in massive agricultural subsidies, the bulk of which go to said monopolies.
yeah, I was thinking there is absolutely 0 chance, as a percentage of household income, that people werent spending more more money on food in 1820 than now.
>Pizza night is $40 now (two pizzas and a breadstick-side), compared to $20
Honestly domino's is pretty good and is still $8 for a large carry out.
Honestly if you're okay with spending $40 for whatever pizza you like, it becomes redicously worth it to just cook it. Pizza is one of the cheapest foods to make.
For comparison I spend 10-20% more over the same time period in Virginia for groceries. It is certainly not double, not even close. But eating out has gotten rediculous.
I want per-capita numbers, otherwise these graphs are with "population goes up, food spending goes up". A real mystery.
The only real statement we get is,
> From 2019 to 2020, every State and Washington, DC, saw decreases in inflation-adjusted, per capita total food spending.
But the overall graph featured near the top of the article's slope is steep enough, I think, that the per-capita number hidden somewhere in there is also increasing across the duration. If I've done the napkin math right, roughly $2k/person/yr to $2.7k/person/yr.
But the big graph as presented confounds the problem we want to see the data on (stuff is getting more expensive) with population growth.
"From 2019 to 2020" was going directly into the bottom of the pandemic shutdowns. Ignore that, that's a cherrypicked outlier. Compare the annualized differential from 2019 to 2023 if you want to see real numbers. (Even the first half of 2022 still had significant pandemic drag.)
Interesting timing—Target claims consumers' discretionary spending is down, "both in dollars and units". I wonder if this points towards food prices climbing faster than inflation.
Shhh, don't look at that. Just focus on
"U.S. GDP grew at a 4.9% annual pace in the third quarter, better than expected (cnbc.com)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38025177 and celebrate. Sure, 90% of Americans under 50 will never be able to buy a house. They are one injury away from bankruptcy. But the GDP!
This is a byproduct of the US political polarization. The state of the economy (and every other attribute of the US) has become a football game, and you must agree with your team on the state of it per whatever the talking head coach says, lest you grant the opposing team a "win". This ruins honest discourse about the state of things.
Aren't age-adjusted homeownership rates roughly the same for millennials as it was for baby boomers?
I won't argue that it's harder and more expensive, it sure is, but millennials seem to prioritize it enough to do whatever it takes to own a home, so home prices keep going up.
Same here in Germany, it's crazy how much more we spend on food now. I used to usually spend slightly over 400€ for us two per month, just a few years ago. Nowadays, I struggle to stay below 600€.
But that's not what's happening in this article. The Food Away From Home share has hit an all-time high, and FAFH costs more (because it contains more internalized labor than groceries).
Americans eat out a lot because they are unbelievably rich.
paxys|2 years ago
FAH = food at home
FAFH = food away from home
So, eating out is killing our wallets. Not really a surprise considering "dollar menu" items at McDonalds now cost $6 and a halfway decent lunch is upwards of $17-20.
It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.
Clubber|2 years ago
Yea, it's crazy what eating out costs, and what having that same food delivered costs. It's damn convenient though.
>It's too hard to change habits in the short term, but I fully expect that over time people are going to start cooking more and cutting back on restaurant visits and the industry is going to take a huge hit because of it. Prices are simply out of control. Even more so considering the default tip expectation has crept up from 10% to now 20-25%.
I just bought stuff to make chicken quesadillas. It cost about $9 and I'll probably make at least 8 of them and have some chicken and tortilla left over after that. I can afford to eat out, but it seems like a ripoff and I just don't like getting ripped off.
ne0flex|2 years ago
crazygringo|2 years ago
No need to exaggerate. It's called the "$1 $2 $3 Dollar Menu" now, and in my expensive urban area, the priciest item on it is $3.19 (McDouble).
It's definitely not an actual dollar like it was twenty years ago, but it's sure not $6 either.
vikingerik|2 years ago
To see the real numbers, look at the annualized differential between 2019 and 2023.
pkulak|2 years ago
chiefalchemist|2 years ago
Cooking at home means going to the supermarket (or going online and ordering from the SM). If you have to cook for more than yourself, then you probably need to also put sometime into planning the meals for the week. And then of course there's the time to cook the meals. There's also cleanup. Also, let's not forget that there are plenty of people who never really learned to cook and now fear the kitchen.
Sure meals from the frozen section are an option but they're maybe only slightly less expensive than FAFH.
In any case, FAH takes time *and* effort. Perhaps not a lot of time + effort - and habit - but enough to make it easy to say, "F** it. Let's FAFH..."
If FAFH establishments start closing, local towns are going to turn into ghosts towns. FAFH is about the only thing left in a lot of cases; aside from web dispensaries.
People should have been FAH'ing long ago for health reasons and that obviously didn't workout at all.
superkuh|2 years ago
Eating at home is going to save you money compared to eating out. But eating at home costs have gone up a shocking amount as well.
lotsofpulp|2 years ago
I don’t see how. Written and video recipes available for free online. Instant pot and a couple other items cost $100?
Time and effort are the remaining ingredients.
musicale|2 years ago
dopylitty|2 years ago
swatcoder|2 years ago
We can hope, but it seems unlikely to me that it would go quite like that. I'm pretty sure that once people are used to budgeting a larger share of their income on food, processed food companies and their retailers will happily soak up whatever gets trimmed from restaurant spending. There might be a net savings for those early to transition, but if it becomes a cultural trend, supermarket prices will just creep up to match the customary food budget.
Restaurants may lose, but food manufacturers and supermarkets will likely claw back the difference before they let it go back to families.
soperj|2 years ago
swatcoder|2 years ago
As a hardline economist in academia, you can say that those are what matter to poverty or starvation because people will eventually become desperate enough to reject their lived culture and return to an alien world of basic foods, but policy makers need to be realistic and acknowledge that most people have no idea how to eat without branded processed foods, fast food convenience, etc. The cultural traditions that made simple foods practical have been lost from many families and those never-learned recipes and habits don't just restore themselves to people overnight when times get tough.
That inconvenient reality of what people actually eat needs to get folded into these economic models for them to actually report on what they intend to. Otherwise, the measures just speaking to a lost time and the smattering of rustic immigrants who still know how to live satisfyingly on traditional staples.
itsoktocry|2 years ago
Is the 80s methodology more accurate or realistic? That's all that matters.
NickC25|2 years ago
babyshake|2 years ago
cheriot|2 years ago
If this is under counting inflation then spending at restaurants is up even more. I guess people have money to spend and are enjoying the restaurant scene.
azmodeus|2 years ago
strikelaserclaw|2 years ago
cheriot|2 years ago
karaterobot|2 years ago
eatsyourtacos|2 years ago
Groceries are up easily 20-30% over the last few years. Some items more, some have stayed kind of stable.
It's ludicrous.
Would anyone reading this say their grocery bill has gone down since 4 years ago??
laidoffamazon|2 years ago
The comments are literally data being "refuted" with anecdotes.
kajumix|2 years ago
ceejayoz|2 years ago
But the average person doesn't eat only eggs and meat, which is what the 6% reflects.
bluedino|2 years ago
Beef on the other hand...
lukas099|2 years ago
Yhippa|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
HDThoreaun|2 years ago
conjecTech|2 years ago
I think retailers would like us to believe these increases are just them passing through rising commodity prices from inflation, but I am increasingly convinced it is collusion, either implicit or explicit, to increase margins. The most compelling evidence this is happening seems to be Costco, which generally sets its prices at near-fixed 15% markup hasn't experienced nearly the same increases and is selling similar products at less than half of that price.
I think the entire thing is indicative of a growing disconnect between the cost of commodities and what consumers are paying due to increased consolidation and collusion among retailers.
edmundsauto|2 years ago
I have a(n unsupported) theory that gung-ho retailers try out amazon from time to time, in an effort to expand. Maybe they hire someone who knows how to sell there. They price based on how they do in store, then after a few months do a reconciliation and realize how much money they lose due to amazon's ads/stocking/shipping costs. Then they raise prices.
Each time this happens, you see massive fluctuations upwards as they have to cover their cost + amazon's charges. Then a competitor gets a new ecomm/marketing/growth person who sees an "opportunity" because all the competition has priced things way too high. That person pitches leadership on how they can sell more items without much more effort ("thanks Jeff Bezos!"), but the actual understanding of how much it costs doesn't come until a couple of months later.
dcchambers|2 years ago
There's a very good chance much of that price increase is due to increase cost of shipping. Even if Amazon gives you "free" shipping - they're building that price into the price of the product... They're not eating the shipping cost on a low margin item like a cereal grain.
I can buy organic locally grown oats at my expensive local health food co-op for less than $2/lb...unchanged from years ago.
lotsofpulp|2 years ago
I would use a retailer known to keep margins as low as possible like Costco as a better gauge. I buy rolled oats all the time, and between Costco and Trader Joe’s, I have not noticed any pricing swings in oats.
vikingerik|2 years ago
bugglebeetle|2 years ago
hinkley|2 years ago
The United States is almost 250 years old. "Ever" and you only looked at 30 years is some first-rate hand-wringing bullshit.
What this article really says is that we are spending more money on food not prepared at home, and food not prepared at home is more expensive, duh.
laidoffamazon|2 years ago
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DFXARX1M020SBEA
xxpor|2 years ago
rpastuszak|2 years ago
Does a US-centric version of a tool like this one exist?
bluedino|2 years ago
The bucket of chicken meal at KFC is $36
McDonald's combo meals are $11 instead of $6
Lattes seem to be $2 more
Still spending almost double a week on groceries than I was 2 years ago
ApolloFortyNine|2 years ago
Honestly domino's is pretty good and is still $8 for a large carry out.
Honestly if you're okay with spending $40 for whatever pizza you like, it becomes redicously worth it to just cook it. Pizza is one of the cheapest foods to make.
For comparison I spend 10-20% more over the same time period in Virginia for groceries. It is certainly not double, not even close. But eating out has gotten rediculous.
deathanatos|2 years ago
The only real statement we get is,
> From 2019 to 2020, every State and Washington, DC, saw decreases in inflation-adjusted, per capita total food spending.
But the overall graph featured near the top of the article's slope is steep enough, I think, that the per-capita number hidden somewhere in there is also increasing across the duration. If I've done the napkin math right, roughly $2k/person/yr to $2.7k/person/yr.
But the big graph as presented confounds the problem we want to see the data on (stuff is getting more expensive) with population growth.
vikingerik|2 years ago
MrRolleyes|2 years ago
carabiner|2 years ago
candiddevmike|2 years ago
claytonjy|2 years ago
I won't argue that it's harder and more expensive, it sure is, but millennials seem to prioritize it enough to do whatever it takes to own a home, so home prices keep going up.
laidoffamazon|2 years ago
Dig1t|2 years ago
nradov|2 years ago
Food is just one component of the CPI so it's possible for food prices to increase a lot even while overall inflation remains low.
Semaphor|2 years ago
paulpauper|2 years ago
jeffbee|2 years ago
Americans eat out a lot because they are unbelievably rich.
infamouscow|2 years ago
m3kw9|2 years ago
vitiral|2 years ago