Deflation could put pressure on retailers and brands to drive more volume, debut innovative products and find other ways to cover costs such as higher wages.

Key Points

  • As shoppers await price cuts, retailers like Home Depot say their prices have stabilized and some national consumer brands have paused price increases or announced more modest ones.
  • Yet some industry watchers predict deflation for food at home later this year.
  • Falling prices could bring new challenges for retailers, such as pressure to drive more volume or look for ways to cover fixed costs, such as higher employee wages.
  • @dragontamerEnglish
    4•9 months ago

    COVID19 saw massive declines in food consumption, to the point where milk was dumped, pigs were slaughtered, chickens were culled.

    US Policy under such times is to keep producing high amounts of food to ensure our food security and fund the dumping of milk, pigs, chickens, etc. etc. It takes years to grow an animal for slaughter, if we didn’t do that we would have had not enough meat as we came out of COVID19.

    So much of our economy worked because we have policies and watchdogs thinking about economic policies. This sort of shit is invisible to the typical citizen, but is key to why our country came out on top, while others did not.

    We still had a big blip in egg prices on the reverse end as we came out of COVID19 and people wanted fancier foods again. But we normalized pretty quickly in the great scheme of things, and our policy to explicitly waste food during recessionary times / deflationary times (like COVID19) was key to making sure our production pipeline remained full, and that our food supply remained secure.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/14/business/coronavirus-farmers-killing-pigs.html

    These are dark days on many American pig farms. Coronavirus outbreaks at meatpacking plants across the Midwest have created a backlog of pigs that are ready for slaughter but have nowhere to go. Hundreds of thousands of pigs have grown too large to be slaughtered commercially, forcing farmers to kill them and dispose of their carcasses without processing them into food.

    People will stop consuming meat if I dunno… meatpacking plants are full of COVID19 sickness and no one packs any meat. The pigs get shot / burried instead and the end-consumer goes without pork for a bit. This literally just happened a few years ago, so I’m surprised people don’t remember this…

    We literally staved off an apocalyptic economic event through shear determination. We should be more proud of our accomplishment.

    • @dragonflyteaparty
      4•9 months ago

      People will stop consuming meat if dunno. meatpacking plants are full of COVID19 sickness and no one packs any meat.

      That’s not about prices being too high. It’s about people being too sick to do the work…

      • @dragontamerEnglish
        -3•9 months ago

        We didn’t eat that pork.

        We shot those pigs and then buried them and left them to rot. No one got that meat.

        Then a bunch of idiots who can’t read basic statistics complain about inflation and the rising cost of meat a few months / years later.

        That’s the ‘Transitory’ argument to inflation. That the meat was a temporary blip. Fortunately (???) I think it turns out that other bits of inflation ended up being real so the 5.25% rate hike remained a good idea. But the meat and eggs inflation was likely a direct result of our COVID-19 emergency plans.