Grocery affordability has measurably improved since hitting bottom in 2023. That should be good news for retailers and brands counting on shoppers to loosen up. It isn’t, at least not yet.
The inaugural Acosta Group Affordability Tracker concludes that anyone managing a category or running a store needs to sit with the fact that affordability and consumer behavior are no longer moving in parallel. Shoppers have more buying power than they did three years ago, yet they still shop as if they don’t.
That gap is the defining challenge of the current retail environment.
What the Acosta Group Affordability Tracker Actually Measures
Most grocery affordability conversations stop at shelf prices. This one doesn’t. The Acosta Group Affordability Tracker measures grocery affordability by calculating the relationship between the cost of a typical stock-up trip and median hourly earnings for full-time U.S. workers, sourcing grocery pricing data from NIQ Discover Total U.S. Food sales data and wage data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
At the center of the tracker is Acosta Group’s Typical Stock-Up Trip: an 84-item basket spanning 10 departments and 67 categories, aligned to USDA guidance for a four-person household on a moderate-cost food plan. Today, that basket costs $366.04, approximately 27% more than the comparable four-week period in 2020, when the same basket ran roughly $288.
Expressed in work hours, a median full-time worker today needs approximately 11.9 hours of labor to afford that basket. At the peak of grocery inflation in 2023, the figure stood at approximately 12.6 hours. By 2025, wage growth had pulled it down to approximately 11.8 hours. The grocery affordability recovery, in other words, is real, and it has now largely plateaued.
Wages Helped. Prices Didn’t Fall
The grocery affordability recovery was not built on price relief. Grocery prices did not come down. According to the tracker, the basket increased 3.7% versus year-ago levels in the latest four-week reporting period. What closed the affordability gap was wage growth outpacing grocery inflation during portions of the recovery period; median hourly earnings rose from $23.93 in 2020 to $30.88 in early 2026, per the report.
That distinction matters enormously for Hispanic supermarkets and independent operators serving cost-sensitive communities. Higher wages in a customer’s household improve their grocery affordability on paper. Whether those customers feel it, or shop differently because of it, is another question entirely.
The Acosta Group data suggests they don’t. Not yet.
Inflation-Era Habits Have Become the New Default
Here is the insight that should be reshaping promotional planning and planogram decisions right now: the shopping behaviors consumers developed under inflationary pressure are not unwinding with the pressure itself.
Promotional engagement remains elevated. Unit sales remain under pressure in many store departments even as dollar sales climb, meaning shoppers are paying more but buying less, not trading up. Brand loyalty continues to reflect the flexibility consumers discovered during the inflation years, when private label and alternative products earned their way into baskets by delivering sufficient value at lower price points.
Colin Stewart, EVP of Business Intelligence at Acosta Group, put the implication plainly: “The most important implication may be that improving grocery purchasing power alone does not appear to be reversing many of the shopping behaviors consumers developed during the inflationary period. Consumers have adapted to a marketplace defined by higher prices, and many of the habits developed during that adaptation now appear increasingly durable.”
For an independent supermarket operator whose shoppers have always been acutely value-conscious, and who navigated these past five years with their customers’ budgets under sustained pressure, none of this is surprising. The inflationary period didn’t invent price sensitivity in this channel. It deepened it.
Related Article: In-Store Grocery Shopping Remains King for American Consumers
The Grocery Affordability Recovery Has Stalled and That Changes the Game
After improving steadily from 2023 through 2025, grocery affordability has largely stabilized. Future gains, the report notes, are more likely to be incremental than the recovery pace seen during the immediate post-inflation period.
For retailers and brands, that stabilization changes the nature of competition. When grocery affordability is improving rapidly, a rising tide lifts many boats. When it plateaus, the margin for error narrows. Pricing architecture, promotional effectiveness, assortment discipline and value communication all become sharper differentiators.
The report is direct about where competitive advantage now lives: execution, not macroeconomic tailwinds.
What This Means for Grocery Operators and CPG Suppliers
The Acosta Group Affordability Tracker does not segment by ethnicity or income band; it measures directional trends for the median U.S. full-time worker. But its implications carry specific weight for the independent grocery channel, where operators have long understood that value communication is not optional and promotional performance is not a nice-to-have.
The tracker specifically notes that improvements in grocery affordability do not eliminate the pressure consumers feel from non-grocery expenses, a reality that maps directly onto the financial profiles of many grocery shoppers.
The brands and retailers best positioned in this environment, the report concludes, are those that make value visible, understandable and easy to recognize, not those waiting for economic conditions to do the persuasion for them.
Familiarity no longer closes the sale. The inflationary period saw consumers experiment widely with private brands and alternative products. Many of those experiments stuck. The burden of proof for branded goods and full-price items has permanently risen.
The Affordability Mindset Is Now the Baseline
The Acosta Group Affordability Tracker frames its most consequential finding with a phrase worth posting on every buyer’s office wall: the affordability mindset is outlasting the grocery affordability recovery.
Shoppers today possess more purchasing power than they did at the peak of inflation. They are still shopping with the discipline they built when they had less. That combination — improved means, persistent caution — defines the competitive environment entering the second half of 2026.
Summer travel spending, back-to-school and the holiday season will test that dynamic in real time. Whether promotional engagement moderates as budgets ease, or remains elevated regardless, will tell retailers and brands a great deal about whether these behavioral shifts are cyclical or structural.