Food is something necessary to life and so it may seem, to those not in the business, that grocery stores would be immune to recessions. For the most part, U.S. grocery stores as an industry have weathered the two recessions of the decade 2000–2009 far better than other industries. But, as can be seen in the graph, even grocery stores saw sales slow during the recessions.

Today’s market size is the estimated total of sales by grocery stores and supermarkets in the United States in 2000 and 2009. These sales totals do not include the sales made through convenience stores.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2000 and 2009
Market size: $381.72 billion and $487.41 billion respectively
Source: “Estimated Annual Sales of U.S. Retail and Food Service Firms by Kind of Business: 1998 Through 2009,” Annual Retail Trade Survey—2009, available in a PDF format here. For links to these data as well as earlier U.S. Annual Trade Survey data, check this Census Bureau site.
Original source: U.S. Bureau of the Census
Posted on October 12, 2011