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.
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.
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?”
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