What food/drink have you Noped out of due to rising costs?

Cafe Society
1

The title is pretty clear, but I’ll still include the details and exceptions.

I do the majority of the basic shopping in my household, with my wife doing the more premium Trader Joe’s (for value of premium of course) runs. I have joined in the many complaints in this and other forums about inflation, shrinkflation, price gouging (especially during and even after the COVID peaks) and the like. But while inflation is (barely) easing, and COVID’s persistence have become the new normal, prices on most things are still very high.

Keeping that in mind, what foods and drinks have you stopped buying all together for COST reasons. If you gave it up for health, or ethical choices, that does not count. If it’s something you only buy on sale, or rare occasions, it also doesn’t count (unless you’re some lucky sot that only bought it because it was 80% off the back of a truck, no questions asked, so you figured why not?). Not buying for shortish term reasons (like the semi-recent egg spike) also doesn’t count unless you find them still too pricy. I’ll also allow exceptions if someone else was buying it for you, or gave you a gift card.

So again, if you’re paying with your own money, and no too-good-to-be-true specials, what things do you just not buy anymore?

For myself, it’s potato chips. I mean, I bought them semi-rarely in the last few years, because even then they’re pricy, junky carbs and salt, but still loved having them (especially salt and vinegar) on occasion. On the last grocery trip, I had a craving, and checked prices. And my local Kroger had a name brand 8.5 oz bag (which is ‘big’ by their standards even if by mass it’s tiny) for $5.99. And I just walked away. I remember the last time I got some a month or so ago and barely made myself pay $4.99, but this has pushed me into the absolute ‘no’ category going forward.

Your turn!

2

Pretty much nothing. We’re already pretty frugal, and make our own food from actual ingredients instead of weird box or can concoctions.

I guess I’m more willing to buy Cazadores instead of Don Julio.

Gotta live, ya know?

3

Also pretty much nothing. There are foods that i choose less as the price goes up, and foods that i eat a lot more of in season, when the price goes down (blueberries, anyone?) But i can’t think of anything I’ve completely dropped just due to price.

4

Like the first two respondents, I haven’t changed my purchasing patterns much. But I am less likely to buy organic stuff now, if it is twice the price of the non-organic version. (Which is not always the case - there is very little difference in price for some products, in which case I do go for organic.)

5

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of anything. My menus and pantry and all are the same as they were pre-pandemic, but I’ve never really splurged on anything. Perhaps I buy beef a little less frequently than usual? That’s all I could even think of.

6

It is my nature to be price sensitive. There are things that I buy less often or wait to go on sale. There is no food I need so badly that if the price is twice what I expect, I will pay it in the short term (excepting the occasional emergency or wish to prepare a precise dish). I am a good cook, and a flexible one.

7

Potato chips are a mostly-no now.

Decent cheeses were never a huge part of my diet, but I’d get them regularly for cheese and cracker nights. Now? I’m only buying the cheapest blocks of cheese, and nothing at all fancy. They’re just too expensive.

And I’m buying very little meat. It seems like bacon is the only one that hasn’t gotten ridiculous. It’s more expensive than it was, but not to the extent that beef and chicken have gone off the rails. Even ground beef is stupidly expensive.

8

I also haven’t really cut back on anything. I enjoy good food and drink, but we don’t eat out a lot and I like to cook, so it’s not that expensive to eat well. As long as I can afford it I’m not going to cut back on the basic fundamental pleasure of making and eating good food. If anything, crab legs are an occasional indulgence I buy less often because it’s gotten ridiculously expensive.

9

I’m embarrassed to say I’m price insensitive when it comes to food shopping. I could never be a politician as I could never tell you the price of a pint of milk. Weirdly, the only thing I check prices on is tooth paste - why do some cost £2 and some cost £6? I’m sorry, the £2 tube will be Just Fine.

10

Again, nothing really. What we have done is be a little more careful with planning our meals and only buying what we know we are going to use. We hate waste anyway so being more aware of rising costs just adds extra impetus.
I don’t have to, but the stingy northern git in me compels me thus.

11

Before the pandemic I cut back on my purchases of Tombstone pizza because while their base price didn’t increase much, their sales offers were getting few and far between. Then, I needed frozen food during the pandemic so I started purchasing them at full retail again.

But then they did a double whammy. They shrinkflated the size of the pizza, and then, either to cover it up (or, being extremely generous, perhaps the smaller pizza was more liable to breakage) they put a large cardboard box around the pizza. Yet, since Tombstone tastes good, I still would have bought the same number of pizzas.

But I used to be able to fit 4 pizzas in my freezer and now can only fit 2, and I’ll be damned if I will take them home and open them before putting them in, especially since they also have a hard time fitting into even a large bag, so it would make my grocery shopping bulkier too.

I feel so strongly about this that it is the only time I actually Tweeted something - this happened a couple months before the Muskopalypse after which I deleted my account. They didn’t respond and I only got one or two likes.

Oh well, I guess I will continue to buy only 2 tombstone pizzas every time I go shopping rather than 4. Heckuva job, there.

12

My gf does the grocery shopping for the most part. She doesn’t look at prices. She has a list on her phone and buys whatever is on the list.

She occasionally will tell me her total seemed high, and I’ll look through her receipt. I’ll find something stupidly expensive, like cherries early in the season that are $XX a pound and she grabbed a big bag.

13

I’ve decided no more Turkey Hill ice cream. Bad enough no one sells half-gallon cartons any longer, but TH dropped theirs from 48 oz to 46 oz. How freekin’ cheezy is that??? Is their profit margin so thin that 2 ounces are so critical?

Screw 'em. I’ll get my ice cream (correction - frozen dairy dessert) elsewhere.

Frozen dairy dessert, indeed… that’s another rant.

14

I’m the same way. During the eggflation crisis, I would think 'huh, I should pay attention to how much a dozen eggs cost" but I kept forgetting to, despite the fact that I regularly grocery shop and buy eggs. I had and still have no idea how much a dozen eggs cost pre-pandemic, at the height of their inflated cost and now.

15

Food in the U.S. is cheap compared to Europe, or so I have always heard. The replies to this thread seem to match that impression.

I’m a price-conscious grocery buyer, and have always been, and I do 90 % of it in our household. The inflation / shrinkflation we live with has taken all the joy out of buying groceries to me.

There are no more deals - only crappy make-believe deals, where the price of X on sale is higher than the normal price used to be just a couple years ago.

I can no longer afford to buy fish. Luckily I fish myself, but that’s a drop in the ocean as far as our yearly fish consumption should / would be. I take cod liver oil to get some of the health benefits of fish.

Fancier cuts of meat are straight off the menu now. Luckily (see above) I hunt myself, and we get fancy dishes with meat that way, every once in a longish while.

Cruciferous veggies, the best kind, have become too expensive to buy, most of the time. We have a greenhouse with Brassica growing, to compensate. But it’s not enough.

etc. etc.

16

They do? I haven’t seen any non-USAians quote food prices. When I’ve shopped in the US, it hasn’t felt particularly cheap to me. The exchange rate doesn’t help, of course.

17

Chile here:

Sadly, milk (cheapest 1L is around U$1.3) … and eggs (u$0.3 to 0.4 each!!) …

I used to make natural yogurt with one L of milk for the whole family … now not so much

we also pretty much settled for the cheapest cheese (U$6-7 x 500g) …

we are a family of 5 (w/ 3 teenagers) … so we kinda-have-to-keep-tabs-on-the-supermarket-bill

but prices seem to be slowly coming down

18

For us, it’ s mostly beef- especially tri-tip, steaks, etc. I just can’t justify the cost except if I’m lucky enough to find tri tip on sale for an ok price because I always try to cook for having leftovers and steaks, well they are just good for the next day on a salad but not really something we can buy enough of or enjoy that much after the first day. The only thing that I’ve found that still can feed us for not too much is a pork roast. Chicken - I wish everyone else hadn’t figured out that boneless thighs taste better because I used to be able to buy a big pack of them for $6-7 , now its more like $11-12.

We don’t have a choice but I think all the time what if there was a cheaper way to feed my dogs. I’ve fed Purina One for 20 years - it’s gone from about $28 for a 40 lb to $55-60 now for a 31 lb. That’s not even counting the dog I have to keep on a prescription diet , her dog food is $113 a bag. So not noped out of but I will say, we haven’t replaced the last dog that passed and we were once a 8 dog household, now down to 3.

19

The price of my (more expensive) pastured eggs never increased.

20

At one point we cut back on eggs when they were ridiculous prices, but they were often sold out in the stores so it wasn’t an decision. But other than that, no changes. Food costs just aren’t that big a factor in our lives, and I like to cook good food.