Americans Discover Credit Cards Don't Actually Pay Themselves

A new report confirms Americans can't afford groceries. Worse, they're buying groceries with credit cards. Even worse, they can't make the minimum payment on those credit cards. That's three layers of f*cked before we've even discussed what they're buying.

Affordability is a "defining challenge" according to people who get paid to write reports about things everyone already knows. Rent costs too much. Food costs too much. Gas costs too much. The report needed to exist because apparently we require documentation that life is expensive. Revolutionary stuff.

The credit card detail is the real gem here. Someone swiped plastic for a gallon of milk, then couldn't scratch together eighteen dollars for the minimum payment thirty days later. That's not a financial strategy. That's a countdown timer.

Food costs are leading the way, which makes sense because you can't simply decide to stop eating. You can stop buying new phones. You can cancel Netflix. You can't cancel breakfast. So the credit card becomes a subscription service for not starving, except the interest rate is 27% and the rewards program is bankruptcy.

The technical analysis here is straightforward. When the line representing "ability to buy food" crosses below the line representing "willingness to pretend everything is fine," you get a buy signal for credit card debt. Then that debt compounds. Then you're paying interest on interest you couldn't afford in the first place. Chart goes up, life goes down.

Retail traders will read this headline and think it's bullish for grocery store stocks. Higher food costs mean higher revenue, right? They'll pile into Kroger calls while buying those same overpriced groceries with a Discover card at 29.99% APR, somehow missing that they are both sides of the trade and losing both.

The report finds affordability is a defining challenge, but the real challenge is defining how many consecutive months you can roll grocery debt before the defining challenge becomes which bridge you're sleeping under.

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