Collusion
News reads more and more as advertisement. "Walgreens just lowered prices!" is what I'd expect to see between news stories not in them.
Greedflation. Call it what it is.
Dont let em sit satisfied on these pitiful reductions either. Make them drop enough to at least undo some of their thievery
Businesses reduced prices when people started buying less of their product? HOW COULD IT BE.
Everyone wants a ton of cheap shit and they feel like price is owed to them. You want prices to be lower for shit? Stop buying shit. I assure you, that will really freak them out.
You want to see CEOs lose their jobs? Stop buying shit. You want to see the managerial class shrink? Stop buying shit.
The fact remains, no one is going to stop buying stupid shit. The entire global culture, to varying degrees but with few exceptions, is tilted towards consumerism.
Everyone keep doing what you're doing. Everything is fine. No cause for panic. You don't need savings. You don't need property of any sort. Want a song? I'll rent it to you. Want to live somewhere? I'll rent it to you. Movie? I'll rent it to you. Education? I'll loan it to you.
There are people with property, and those allowed to use it for a fee. Welcome to neo-feudalism.
I don't think there should be price caps, but, I think we could get somewhere having a maximum amount you're allowed to raise your prices by in a single year and how long you have to take to get there.
I think this rate should be tied to federal interest rates to create a competing class interest to the owner class wanting interest rates to stay low forever even if it breaks the bank for everyone else.
Marxists: inflation isn't caused by increase in wages that drive up demand, its caused by companies conspiring to increase prices. This was proven 125 years ago in Value, Price and Profit...
Non-Marxists: god can't you ideologues just stop repeating the same outdated theories? There's no conspiracy, class isn't real
Inflation: happens
Workers: I think there's a conspiracy to raise the prices of things because wages went up
Corporate and government overlords: no, you see increase of wages creates increase in demand of goods which increases prices, I went to Yale
Workers: i just got a raise and yet I can't afford to eat anymore
lol CVS sends me coupons all the time, and I'm always dumbfounded what to buy because their prices are sky high
In the market, this is referred to as "price elasticity". The basic concept of it is: if you charge less, you sell more, and can increase profits. There's obviously limits to this (which are largely unknown) if you charge so little that everyone who would buy your product is buying your product, then reducing costs any more than that, will result in less profit. So there is a "sweet spot" of pricing that returns the most money.
I learned about this more than a decade ago and what I was taught at the time was that there were very few items that are generally considered to be very inelastic for pricing: petrol (gasoline), booze, and tobacco. Gas, because everyone needs to drive, booze because drunks are going to drink, and tobacco because nicotine addiction. Even then, there's still some elasticity in the pricing, more so as time marched on; stuff like hybrid cars, work from home, etc, for gas, booze, with the availability of (kind of crap) liquors that are priced accordingly, and the force of the anti-smoking campaigns/concepts/etc.
Other things were always considered far more price elastic, like food. During and after the pandemic, options for purchasing food were limited, so they fell into a more price inelastic status, since demand didn't change, but supply became more limited. I'm sure more than a few things like farmers markets, became inaccessible. The people who would be using such inexpensive options were suddenly forced into buying from grocery stores and price fixing and gouging was more possible; not dissimilar to how gas prices work. Each location would raise prices to match whatever their "competitors" were doing.
Now that people have started to find alternatives, either by growing a portion of their groceries, or finding less expensive alternatives or simply buying less, companies are trying to find where the "sweet spot" is for maximum profits.
This isn't a new thing, nor is it unique at all. It's the reason that booze, gas, and tobacco have some of the highest tax costs of any products. If companies/government/producers believe they can charge more to earn more profit overall, they will. What's happened is that they dug so deep in raising prices that profits took a dip. They're selling each unit for more profit, but so many fewer units that they make less overall.
It is the way of capitalists to find the highest price that people will pay and still buy a thing.
They have clearly gone too far, and it has cost them their precious profits.
So the market works. What's the issue then
actually, the inflation that's happening is because the US government keeps printing money just to dump into the stock market every couple of months
At the beginning of the pandemic when the stock market did a 90 degree drop, the government passed that one bill that printed $2,000,000,000,000 per day and dumped it into the stock market to keep it afloat.
That's where the inflation is coming from. Not millennials and Gen-Z getting living wages.
