Yummy!
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And don’t forget the sneaky reduction in package/contents sizing. Most folks don’t pay attention to that fine print, but it’s an easy way to gull the buyers, without raising the stated price.
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Surely at this point someone has pointed out that the we as U.S. citizens are the biggest bestest economic resource in the country.
A giant Pullman town.
NO it’s not!
I bought into the conspiracy theory when my dog groomer raised her rate by $10.
I really don’t understand economics. So I’ll post …lol… just a bullet point.
Inflation is the rate of increase in prices over time. [emphasis added]
Rate is a concept we humans don’t grasp well. The rate of increase is a measure of speed. Not only are prices increasing, they are increasingly increasing.
In my opinion, the widespread nature of the inflation following the peak of the pandemic was a matter of supply and demand. To some extent, those problems are still there, but price increases following price increases applied to select products would seem to be something else.
P.S. Increasing rates is the deadly menace in other areas, like environment. Yes, we’re emitting more CO2 this year than last. But CO2 is not only going up, the rate of increase is going up too – the increase in CO2 is greater than the year before.
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The singularity has left us all behind.
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Easiest way to know they can do that… is minimum wage on Long Island is $15/hr.
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Thx, saying it like it is.
Seems free markets these days are in countries from which we limit immigration.
Of course companies try to game their markets and regulators, and maximize gains while avoiding costs and risks. It’s normal human organizational behavior. That’s why we need free markets for stakeholders to come around the table, work out and design win-win-win outcomes for all the productive activity. Market failures that decrease the general welfare are design and governance failures, are likely unconstitutional.
How many Republican “combinations” agreed to hit “Biden’s economy” with inflation??
Who else noticed that the shipping costs spiked after McConnell’s Elaine Chou, daughter of a shipping magnate, resigned as Secretary of Transportation?
Politics these days…it’s a war!
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At the time, a very wise co-worker of mine said that this was the act that gave industry the OK to do more of it. Ronnie and the Rethugs had their backs.
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Surprise, surprise.
Unpossible that corporations would be using the specter of inflation to raise prices and then blame inflation.
This is true. But unions are concerned about wages, not prices. Prices will take a different effort to resolve.
I was responding to the point that corporate earnings have gone from being shared with labor to going almost exclusively to the top - a return on capital. The Fed is trying to convince us that squashing any wage gains by labor will somehow fix the inflation that is almost entirely about profiteering from a situation that is chaotic enough to sorta hide the fact that the price increases are not warranted by underlying cost pressures - they are a pure money grab on the part of corporations who are doing this because they can. This is not only not driven by wage pressure, labor is not seeing any of the inflationary gains.
This article does not have one single example of how prices are rising to levels that cannot be explained by cost increases, so let me provide one.
Where I live, it was easy to buy a 12 pack of your favorite soda-pop for $3.00. When news of inflation hit, the prices jump to $8.99 a 12 pack. This was not just true for Coke products, but also Pepsi and even RC, Canada Dry, all 12 packs of soda-pop, regardless of brand or flavor, nearly tripled in price “overnight” and have mostly remain so.
That all supermarkets would be selling all brands and have few sales, whereas previously every week one or all brands were on sale, at triple the price of a short time ago clearly says that this is being caused by a NOT free market competition.
Snacks like potato chips also tripled in price but have since mostly come back down to pre-pandemic levels. What this says is that supermarkets have realized that soda-pop has an inelastic demand curve so it can charge higher prices without losing sales.
That is well it is possible that the soda-pop manufactures are behind the tripling in price and are colluding to keep it high, it is more likely the supermarkets because the soda-pop makers, most notably Coke and Pepsi, hate each others guts and it is hard to see them colluding on anything but it is still possible.
But the fact that soda-pop, which is mostly water with carbonation with a little flavor added, has tripled in price whereby there has been no big change in prices or capital investment, says much of inflation is itself manufactured and not real.
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That shit has been going on for 20+ years. In marketing we call it “shrinkflation.”
They get away with it because people are basically morons and marketing companies count on it.
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Look at a Hyundai Elantra hybrid. I bought one in December and it has blind side warnings in the exterior mirrors. Hyundai has been my go-to since 2011.
My brother in law had a new Hyundai. I’ll pass. The 2023 Elantra has a reliability rating of 2 out of 5, according to Consumer Reports. I HATE car repairs. I have no patience for it.
My personal conspiracy is deeper and more perverse. I think the super wealthy are not dumb and have realized the truth of Global Warming for decades. Some of them know/believe this will lead to global upheaval, a major winnowing of the world population, etc. In general, a return to war lord type politics. And they intend to be the war lords. There is no reason to fight the climate change wars, only reasons to buy properties in the right places, build comfortable/powerful vessels, make the right alliances, and practice being authoritarian. Good luck to us all; it’s way worst than increasing the profit margins.
7 years ago, that commie pinko rag The Economist headlined a story “Profits are Too High! America Needs a Giant Dose of Competition.” Of course it’s only gotten worse since then.
Your article doesn’t mention the near-disappearance of meaningful competition in industry after industry since the virtual abandonment of antitrust enforcement that began with Reagan. Competition is supposed to be a key driver of pricing moves, but we’re not seeing much of it these days. Truly, it’s a great time to be a greedy capitalist!
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