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 very fancy way of saying the retailers are having to accept lower margins as the cost of the things they buy to resell stay high.
They’re also really aggressively negotiating supplier cost down at the same time and just gobbling up the difference. It’s not that they’re actually accepting lower margins, they’re making really broad use of deceptive pricing practices like jacking up the price before putting it on sale.
Your formerly $5 stick of deodorant now costs $7 on sale, but the “real” price is $11. Thank golly the retailer is doing so much to keep prices low! It only went up by $2 instead of $6!
May or may not mean that.