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129 comments

  • It's been maddening to watch people call price-gouging "inflation", honestly.

    That's not fucking inflation when someone in the supply chain made things more expensive and pocketed the difference as a wider profit margin; it's the symptom of non-enforcement of antitrust laws.

    I mean, most foodstuffs markets (in the supply chain between farm and grocer or farm -> restaurant) are controlled by very few people or corporations; when the farmers get less for their products but the grocer must pay more for them, that's not inflation. It's price-gouging, the symptom of the kinds of market failures that follow regulatory failures to prevent corporate mergers that would reduce competition in those markets.

    When you look at food, fuel, housing, the enshittification of basically everything, the acquisition of yesterday's hot-fresh-streaming services and re-packaging them to be just as predatory as the cable was when you cut the cord and went to streaming- it's all what we get when private equity owns a piece of everything and they're running it all to squeeze more out of everyone they can, and they also ensure regulators don't do a damned thing about it.

    There was once a time when regulators had the will to block corporate mergers, and they had the will to tax windfall profits at 100%.

  • My wife is charging me 140% more for dinner now, prices are getting insane!

  • Probably because all food prices has outpaced inflation. If you've done any grocery shopping in the past two years between shrinkflation and price increases many food items have doubled in price.

    The right wing always assumes everything is a government conspiracy and the left wing assumes everything is a corporate conspiracy and neither group bothers to think about any other reason for things like this.

    But before blaming the government for "printing money" (when the central banks have done the opposite by raising interest rates) or assuming every grocery store in the world got together to raise prices all at once, maybe we should consider other factors.

    There could be food supply issues. Given this is a global phenomena, we should consider global food supply problems.

    One thing that could cause global food supply is if there was a war in a part of the war that normally exports a large percentage of a staple food to the rest of the world. Where is wheat and grain normally produced? Is there a war happening there?

    The fun thing about economics is the idea of substitutes. Bread is more expensive now? Just have more rice. Grain is too expensive for cattle feed? Mix in some more corn. If you're the only one doing these tricks to reduce your food costs, it works really well. But unfortunately everyone is substituting which results on food prices across the board going up.

    Also Climate Change does have an effect on agriculture. Droughts and floods mean less food is produced. So places which were reliable fields for farming aren't so reliable anymore. So while the war in Ukraine will eventually be resolved which will put some downward pressure on food prices, climate change will continuously be putting an upward pressure on the price of food.

129 comments