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- cross-posted to:
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Multinationals in particular hiked prices far above rise in costs to deliver an outsize impact on cost of living crisis, report concludes
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Real question is what the fuck am I supposed to do about it?
Burning the place down hardly helps and our elected officials don’t give much of a shit, at least around here.
I’m well paid, so it doesn’t matter too much for my family just yet, but there are people for whom this means food insecurity.
I’m still pissed though, because I think people deserve to eat.One thing is… it’s expensive to save money.
Buying in bulk isn’t as bad, but someone living paycheck to paycheck can’t afford that.
I have a vacuum machine, the space to store things, freezers, etc.
I can spend more money upfront to save on food in the long run, but not everyone can do this and it hits them even harder.You’re describing the poverty trap. Its very real. I’m wealthy now as well, but I remember a time when I took the subway 90 mins round trip to my job, and the fare cost almost an hour’s pay. So I’d put in 9.5 hours to work an 8 hour shift and my takehome pay was for 7 hours.
Yea, the grind is becoming impossible though. My old man worked a summer job and could afford university all year on that.
After joining the military for the GI Bill, finishing that commitment, I worked in IT to keep us afloat while my wife went to university.
I left at 5AM for work, worked as much OT as I could, after work instead of sitting in traffic or stuffing on the train like sardines I studied, did all my IT certs, and left work at 7pm. The weekends I worked a second job doing IT. All through university I worked IT on nights and weekends.
The grind you have to do to reach “middle” class is becoming: come from money to afford college, or go into debt for life for uni, or work nonstop always.
How can people take care of kids, family?
Yeah, but the temptation to burn the place down is really smoldering.
Spend less, encourage others to do the same.
Spend less? As in just eat less food?
To be fair most people could reduce their intake by half or more no problem.
Are you surviving off of peanut butter sandwiches? Or have you gotten DoorDash™ recently?
Because there’s no middle ground?
He mentioned quantity of food, I mentioned quality.
You don’t have to eat less if you’re eating food that is overpriced or using scam services like doordash. Just buy more-affordable food and cook your own meals.
But some people think they’re “too good” for that and try to conflate needs with wants. I assume you’re one of them but won’t admit it.
You know what they say when you assume…
I’ve never ordered DoorDash in my life.
Oh yeah, but you’re probably one of the people who conflates needs with wants.
The country I live in at least pretends to respect worker right so no DoorDash. And if I wanted to eat cheap I wouldn’t go for peanut butter sandwiches. But rather like lentils, rice, beans, potatoes. Which, you know what? I do.
Inflation roughly averages 8% over the last couple years. The price of milk has gone up 300%. These are not the same.
To be fair, milk specifically should cost a lot more than it does because our dairy agricultural system is disgustingly abusive to cattle.
It’s also heavily subsidized
They’re subsidized heavily which keeps consumer costs down, but not sure why that should also lead to abusing treatment
is disgustingly abusive to cattle.
Also to humans. I am pretty sure there is no minimum wage law in dairy in the US.
I don’t have receipts to prove it but I don’t think the price of milk has changed all that much. I just got a gallon for like $2.70. Earliest receipt I can find is from Feb of last year and I actually paid a bit more.
We all knew that. Too bad the Federal Reserve and Bank of Canada ignored every sign pointing to greedy companies causing inflation and instead nailed us to the wall.
thats by design, its always on us.
capitalize the gains, socialize the losses.
Socialize the bosses?
Proletarians of the world, unite!
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Capitalism doesn’t believe in Robin Hood. Robbin’ hoods on the other hand…
They exist to support the rich. Low unemployment rates hurt the rich, so they retaliate by raising prices, making people poorer and more desperate and less able to dictate the conditions of their employment. And here we are.
I work for a manufacturing company, and during the demand boom our customers wanted way more product than our facilities are physically capable of producing. I suppose sales could have complexified and ratcheted up our existing rationing process (have to have one at some level when it takes months to produce an order), but raising prices made demand go down so it matched our actual ability to make stuff.
Given the wild increase in demand beyond the infrastructure capabilities, the only alternative to inflation was rationing, and I do not have enthusiasm for ration lines.
Price hikes in a manufacturing context are simply rationing with extra profits, atleast until you build out greater capacity.
This is what happens when you fail to enforce anti-trust law.
This is what happens when most people think the disparity in wealth should grow.
I would love someone to include Canada in these studies. With significantly lower wages than in the US and with the many quasi monopolies in many sectors like telecom and grocery chains and food, I’d like to know how bad Canadians were affected.
Apparently, at least for groceries, there’s an estimated extra $700/year increase next year, with food costs slowing to 2.5-4.5% increases in general, but sticking at 5-7% for bread, vegetables, and meat. It’s still going to cost an average 4-person family $16.3k a year for groceries, though (AKA just over half a full-time minimum-wage salary, prior to paying taxes).
Metro reported a 14% increase in profits for their last quarter compared to last year, and Loblaw’s 11%. According to Google’s earning statements of the last year, Metro has made 27.4% more profits in the last four quarters than they reported in 2020. Loblaws, on the other hand, is actually down 12%, though Google reports they had two really bad quarters this year, and posted a 40% increase in profits between FY 2022 and 2020. So yeah, nothing as egregious as the article, but they’re still outpacing (year over year for the last quarter) both regular and grocery inflation.
I’m sure if I really wanted to, I could dig up the same financial information for Soebys, but I have no clue if Walmart and Costco would keep clean financials readily available for Canada.
Holy shit. Thanks for that.
Chiming in from Australia, our two main supermarket chains (practically a combined monopoly) turned bumper profits over the last year while inflation has been out of control.
The only good news is one of the minor political parties is trying to push an inquiry into how they managed to make significantly higher than usual profits whilst customers are buying only the absolute essentials and farmers are saying that the price they get for groceries & meat hasnt gone up. However it is a minor party with some power, but not enough to force anything to happen without support from a major party and/or a lot of independants, so we will see how that goes
I feel like what happens in both Canada and Australia are like mirror reflections. Except you have a season where everything carries la catches on fire while ours everything freezes over.
No war but the class war
It’s nice they used the word Boosted in the headline.
I was almost mad at the runaway greed of capitalism, but boost just sounds so much nicer than raise.
Not to mention “gouge”.
They decided they deserved to make up all the profit they lost during the pandemic, and they were legally able to increase our prices to do exactly that. It’s as plain and simple as this.
I seem to recall earlier in the year so called “economists “ were telling everyone it wasn’t.
Or predicting 7 out of the last 4 recessions
Yesterday we were shopping at Target and in the frozen aisle they had a sign for the Favorite Day ice cream sandwiches, “Everyday low price $4.99”.
The price on the shelf label, $4.69. Whoops!
No shit
Correct, this is literally how market economics works. The real question is why they weren’t able to do it before, since they had the incentive already (and always do).
Didn’t have a good excuse.
People had a lot more cash on hand after the pandemic, and then wages rose.
I’m sure another 40 years of electing Democrats and Republicans will fix it.
Lol I mean this is literally what inflation is.
It’s not just some thing that happens. People realize they can make more money, so they do. Happens at every step in the supply chain, and thus prices go up across the supply chain.
Prices are set at the limit of what the market will pay
Oh no. Not for essentials and definitely not in our current economic environment. Our economy isn’t designed to have people spend money only on essentials. When people only spend money on rent and food or whole economy is on danger of collapsing.
You’re discussing how things could or should be.
I am discussing the mechanics of inflation
No… Well not in a detailed way and ignores greed. So which would your definition go under demand-pull inflation, cost-push inflation, or built-in inflation.
“Ignores greed”
Greed is always a factor though, this isn’t a new variable to account for. All three categories you provided have a profit motive as the core factor, it’s simply in different layers.
A real example of inflation that isn’t tied to an individuals desire to maximise their benefits from a transaction would be something like extracting an ore than becomes harder as the rich deposits are used up.
Greed is an aspect of any inflation because inflation is explicitly tied to demand.
It’s silly to try to moralize economic concepts.
Always with worst possible take no matter the subject.
