Wages can't keep up with prices, debt is crushing workers, and racial capitalism keeps us divided over shrinking slices. This isn't just inflation—it's collapse.
While economists, politicians and pundits sift daily through a mountain of data—from unemployment rates to gross domestic product, inflation to bank lending rates—one overlooked economic indicator points unambiguously to a deep and imminent economic downturn:
Pizza.
In its February 24th earnings call with the financial press, Domino’s Pizza CEO Russell Weiner reported a 3.2 percent spike in carryout orders during the previous quarter, combined with a 1.4 percent decrease in deliveries.
Weiner attributed this change in consumer behavior to “macro and competitive pressures,” or, in layman’s terms, households in the U.S. increasingly can’t afford delivery fees and driver gratuities that can easily add $10 to the price of a pizza. Weiner continued:
“Delivery is a tougher value right now in this value-conscious world and so, the choice isn't going to another restaurant. Most of the time, it's eating at home.”
Concomitantly, the sales of frozen pizzas have continued to climb since the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, jumping by $1 billion in 2020 to $6.6 billion in annual sales, compared to $5.6 billion in 2019. While that increase could be attributed to the covid-19 lockdowns, consumer appetite for grocery store-bought pizzas continued to increase even after restaurants reopened, reaching nearly $7 billion in 2024. Greenwich Capital Group projects the sale of frozen pizza nationwide will grow by 6.6 percent over the next few years. Said R.J. Hottovy, head of analytical research at Placer.ai, which tracks retail trends.
“During periods of economic uncertainty, it’s common for consumers to shift from takeout to frozen pizza as a cost-saving measure.”
Perhaps more than any other economic indicator, pizza delivery and dining out are yardsticks of Americans’ shrinking buying power. Amid the Great Recession in 2009, frozen pizza sales increased by 3.1 percent, while the ratio of adults who patronized a sit-down restaurant daily decreased from 20 percent in 2006 to 17 percent at the height of the downturn in 2011.
Americans’ dining habits in the 21st century are shaped largely by economic trends that began in the 20th century, specifically incomes, which have barely kept pace with inflation over a nearly 50-year period. Between roughly 1973 and 2017, employees’ wages in the U.S. grew only 0.2 percent when adjusted for inflation.
In a bid to replace profits from a manufacturing sector that has been shipped offshore over the last 40 years, investors have privatized virtually the entire economy, raising the price consumers pay for a kilowatt of electricity, a gallon of water, health care, child care, and education. To make ends meet, American households have depleted their rainy day funds: the savings rate in the first quarter of the year was about 4.1 percent, or about a quarter of what it was in 1975.
And they have also accumulated enormous debts. As of the first quarter of this year, Americans owed a staggering $1.182 trillion in credit card debt—nearly three times what was owed as recently as 1999—although down slightly from the $1.211 trillion owed in the fourth quarter of last year, representing the highest total since the New York Federal Reserve began tracking the data 26 years ago. The average amount owed for cardholders with an unpaid balance is $7,321, with an average interest rate of nearly 22 percent annually.
Unsurprisingly, more than 7 percent of all cardholders are seriously delinquent on their bills (nearly 3 percent are in arrears in paying their auto loans). Both figures are near historically high levels and similar to delinquencies on mortgages in 2007 in the buildup to the housing market crash that triggered the Great Recession, the nation’s worst economic downturn since the Great Depression began in 1929.
The overall effect is that tens of millions of employees in the U.S. earn only enough money to pay their bills but not enough to do those things—dine out, vacation, patronize museums, theaters, cinemas or donate to charitable causes—that make us fully human.
A saleswoman, activist, and mother of two who lives in suburban Philadelphia, Melissa Elayne, posted this week an online exchange she had with a Palestinian woman living in Gaza who appealed to her for help.
“But I need donations, sister. The situation is very bad, and the prices are high.”
Elayne responded:
“I know. I’m broke. I wish I had money.”
The Palestinian woman asked:
This is very bad, sister and what is the reason for your bankruptcy(?.) You don’t get paid, sister(?)
Elayne explained:
“I told her my bills far exceed my meager income, and that our (government) hates us and gives all our money to the military and police.”
In an interview with Black Agenda Report, Elayne said of her activist work with Palestinians.
“I hate even telling them I have a job because the assumption is that I have money, and we all know that nothing could be further from the truth.”
With the growing financial pressures squeezing American consumers, cutting down on dining out or pizza delivery represent low-hanging fruit.
According to a recent survey by LendingTree, more than two-thirds, 78 percent, of respondents said they view fast food as a luxury, 62 percent said that they’re eating out less due to rising prices, and another 43 percent said they refuse to tip when asked to do so.
Several major restaurant chains have closed locations or filed for bankruptcy protection from their creditors in 2024 and early 2025, including Denny's, TGI Fridays, Wendy's, and Hooters. Additionally, chains like Red Lobster, Buca di Beppo, and Rubio’s Coastal Grill have also closed many of their locations or filed for bankruptcy.
The roots of today’s dysfunctional capitalist disequilibrium date back most directly to Ronald Reagan’s White House administration which was singularly obsessed with dismantling the tenuous interracial coalition that had formed during FDR’s New Deal at the nadir of the Great Depression. By the mid-1970s, that multiracial workers’ movement, while deeply flawed, was pocketing half of the nation’s gross domestic output in wages.
Reagan began to chip away at the coalition by ginning up racist attitudes to turn white workers against African Americans who were left unprotected when their decent-paying jobs on the shop floor were the first to be sent overseas. But few whites understood the Hegelian concept of capitalism in which a consumer economy depends on consumer demand, or wages, sufficient to stimulate spending by workers, similar to Henry Ford’s introduction of a $5 workday for the automaker’s employees. By using discrimination in the employment and housing markets, in the criminal justice system and in education to rob Blacks of buying power, America’s system of racial capitalism robs itself of the buying power it needs to flourish.
To bring the conversation full circle, think of the U.S. economy as a pizza. When whites and African American employees collaborate, they gobble up half of the pizza in income, which imbues the overall economy with greater demand.
But under racial capitalism, American workers only command 40 percent of the pizza and politicians—be it Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan—encourage white workers to fight their African American coworkers—not their bosses—for a larger piece of the pie.
Increasingly shrill in the Trump era, the battle for a shrinking piece of the economic pie has transformed the class war into a race war, let the elites off the hook, and reimagined the pizza pie into a bellwether for the worst hard time that is once again bearing down on the U.S.
Jon Jeter is a former foreign correspondent for the Washington Post. He is the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Dark Days and Bright Nights in Obama's Postracial America. His work can be found on Patreon as well as Black Republic Media.
In this week’s segment, we hear about the repatriation of skulls taken from the bodies of Black New Orleanians 150 years ago which were then sent to Germany for study in the practice of racist pseudo…
Our guest is Abayomi Azikiwe, publisher of Pan African Newswire. He joins us from Detroit to discuss the U.S. Africa Command, AFRICOM, and Trump administration plans for continued U.S. interference…
Nineteen Black people who died at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana, in December 1871 and January 1872 were decapitated and their skulls were removed and sent to Leipzig, Germany for study…
The U.S has been involved in every aspect of Ukraine’s military activity against Russia. The recent drone attacks and sabotage were likely committed with U.S. help. Of course, is possible that…
“We cannot write in foreign languages unspoken and unknown by peasants and workers in our communities and pretend that we are writing for…those peasants and workers.”
