Did someone say “greedflation”?
When I can go to a sit down restaurant and have a fresh cooked meal for less than going to mcdonalds, something is wrong. I will never eat there again. Pay more for less, and it’s absolute trash.
Isn’t that wild? My favorite mom and pop shops are at least 33% less expensive and made with solid ingredients (especially real ice cream milk shakes lol)
I wouldn’t recommend making this into a sticker and putting it on the door of these places so people can see. Don’t do that, it would be vandalism.
Almost as if in capitalism, a system where companies are free to choose their prices, inflation could be caused by companies choosing to rise their prices…
Leadership at these companies is personally compensated based on how quickly the company grows. They’re trying to maximize growth of the company by absorbing demand from the higher end, but in the process of doing so they end up pricing out the low end of the market, leaving low end consumers under served. They’re growing, they’re leadership is getting compensated better than ever, but now it’s difficult to find affordable places to eat out.
Theoretically what is supposed to happen in such a situation is new companies come in to take advantage of the gap left, but that’s not really happening because investment is all being focused on higher return opportunities. The low end stuff is still profitable and has potential for growth, but it’s not profitable/growing enough to attract investment over stuff that is perceived to be growing more aggressively.
Unregulated capitalism will be the death of us all.
Capitalism will be the death of us all.
Only once there’s no longer a profit in keeping us alive.
So we’ve got a couple good years left in us!
The death of us all will be the death of us all.
The death of death will be the death of death.
The of will be the of
I’ll take it one step further: currency was a bad idea that turned resource allocation into a number-go-up game.
Disagree. Currency allowed the flourishing of civilization. You can’t effectively trade between cultures or at long distances on the barter system.
What we’ve done with currency since then, yeah, maybe we’re on the same side there. But currency, created as an abstract for value, was a great invention. Civilization as we know it would not have been possible without it.
Though, now that I mention that… maybe civilization “as we know it” isn’t so hot after all.
Don’t you love when you end up talking yourself out of your own argument?
Just a reminder from a very price sensitive shopper that ALDI barely raised any prices through all of this bullshit.
My weekly grocery bill rose from about $80/wk at Aldi to about $110/wk at Aldi in the last 3 years while my shopping has largely remained almost identical. That’s an increase largely in line with overall inflation during the same period.
Also during that same period my house nearly doubled in value for…reasons I guess? I seriously cannot afford to buy a new house in the current housing market so something is going to give at some point…any decade now…
I started shopping at Aldi almost exclusively and it’s been fantastic.
My only complaints about Aldi are that the selection is a bit limited (though they often have some interesting stuff in the “aldi finds” section) and the produce can be a bit hit or miss, but I always do the bulk of my groceries there, then get the rest at Kroger. (Their prices aren’t great, but they’re the cheapest in my area beside Aldi.)
Same with Winco
I love WinCo! They have such great prices and so many options. They even sell this pre seasoned carne asada taco beef that is fucking amazing! I’ve never found it anywhere else. It tastes like legit Mexican carne asada tacos.
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Has their produce improved any? A few years ago it was pretty sketchy at the Aldi here.
That probably depends a lot on your locale. It’s always been pretty ok at the one I shop at. Their fruit is usually good. The biggest difference is that for stuff with short fridge life, like salad kits, you usually only have a few days to use what you get vs. maybe a week or more at a larger store.
We stopped buying salad kits a long time ago. If you just buy the components and do it yourself, it takes more time, but they also last a lot longer.
You can also typically extend the shelf-life of produce by giving it a vinegar wash. Produce naturally has mold spores which will bloom over time and cause rot. Vinegar is acidic enough to destroy most mold spores. So just give them a quick dunk in some white vinegar, then rinse in clean water. It’ll destroy the mold spores and extend the shelf life by preventing rot.
That’s good advice, but it won’t fix wilted lettuce, which happens very quickly in those salad kits. Honestly, just pulling leaves off a head of lettuce and chopping them up is going to help a lot more in terms of budgeting.
Collusion
Isn’t the next step more shrinkflation? Lower sticker prices, but also reduced size products to keep profits right where they’re at now.
True. I’m sure the part they’re not reporting is they reduced prices by 5% but didn’t mention they also reduced per product quantity by 10%.
Just enough for customers to not notice but think they’re getting it for cheaper, while actually paying more per unit of quantity.
They are already doing this. Aldi raised their Elevation protein bars by a few pennies, compared to the competition raising prices by dollars; BUT they dropped in size by a THIRD. So people think they’re getting a great deal, but are only getting 2/3 of the product they used to.
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.
Pretty sure laws exist that are supposed to prevent price gouging, but they require a government that actually enforces said laws…
“Laws” are not the only method humanity has come up with for defending each other against fraudulent and predatory behaviors. Where law has proven incapable of preventing victimization, the guillotine has a proven track record of convincing the ultra rich to stop thinking about their wallets and to start thinking about the needs of the people.
You are obsessed with the idea that you’re going to set up a guillotine to punish the wicked. You are an impotent nerd that gets off on violent fantasy online.
Calm. Down. You can’t even organize effective action against your own diminishing dreams. Stop advocating for violence. You’re in no position to handle it.
Go stroke your gun and fantasize about how it makes you strong and important; meanwhile, the world will, much to your confusion, continue not caring about your opinions.
You’ve read a lot of angry context into that that I did not provide. I think you protest too much.
One interesting aspect of a true democracy is that once the people have sufficient, collective justification to engage in violent revolution, peaceful reform suddenly becomes not just feasible, but the preferred resolution for everyone involved. It’s a bit of a paradox.
si vis pacem, para bellum.
No, I read a lot of context from your angry, impotent, and violent-fantasizing post history.
Your cute little performative Latin phrase is precisely my point.
No one cares about your violent fantasia.
I know, I know, “yer gonna regret saying that to me when they bring out the guillotines!”
Dude. It’s just awkward.
Honestly, I was never a fan of theft, but these big corporations deserve it after these past 3-4 years.
I root for everyone stealing clothes and food from Macy’s, walgreens, etc.
Just DON’T steal from your local mom and pops store!
Remember: If you see someone stealing food from a large company store… No you didn’t.
I can see the appeal of stealing something expensive, where the expected payoff relative to the risk and consequences of being caught is quite large, but to risk theft charges for food? I don’t think anyone would steal food.
If they have a choice, that is.
Y’all have local mom and pop stores?
Corporate Greed will lead to humanity’s end.
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I mean isn‘t what‘s described here also just basic supply/demand?
Unfortunately, the demand for things like food doesn’t go down just because you don’t have money
Exactly! In economics there’s a concept called price elasticity (Incorporating two related principles, elasticity of supply and elasticity of demand).
Elasticity of demand is the more relevant one here. Products with elastic demand are those that consumers are quicker to change their buying habits around. For instance, luxury items. Products with inelastic demand are generally actual necessities (like groceries), where you’re gonna have to buy them one way or another. You can look to alternate suppliers with better prices, but when they’re all gouging you have no choice but to buy from one of them.
In the long run this can indirectly be forced to change. If it gets bad enough that people en-mass started growing their own food at home, this could cause the suppliers to reconsider their prices. (I know that’s a far-fetched example. I’m just using it to broadly illustrate my point.)
Sure, at the basic level, everyone needs food. But you can get a lot more granular about it. For example, a lot of people buy things they may not need to survive, like snacks/desserts. Or perhaps they do buy items they need, but they usually get versions that cost more (whether that be because the particular store is more expensive overall, or simply because they’re buying items that are more costly than things at the lowest end that still allow you to survive like beans and rice).
The point is, most (not ALL) people can buckle down their food spending in some way or another, and I think that’s what we’re seeing here.
What’s your argument here? That we should sacrifice in the name of corporate profits?
I personally am not interested in giving up the few luxury food items I buy so that the CEO of Kroger can buy another fucking yacht.
edit: I meant to say I’m not interested in paying more for less so they can keep buying yachts, but did a terrible job of that and ended up saying the opposite.
When consumers buy less, companies make less money.
There’s no mechanism here where people buying less luxury foods leads to anyone buying yachts. That’s just not a thing in this model and I’m not sure where you got that.
There’s no mechanism here where people buying less luxury foods leads to anyone buying yachts.
That’s… not what I said at all. In fact, the opposite.
edit: You’re right, that is what I said. Not what I meant to say though. I ‘mistyped’. Hence why it doesn’t make sense. Sorry.
Have you tried eating dog food to help the shareholders yet?
Kibble only. If they catch you with some of that fancy wet dog food you’re going to get a lengthy lecture about financial responsibility.
Yeah, but I balance it out by feeding my dog avocado toast.
This reminds me. I’m out of fresh fish for the dog.
I’m not saying that, I’m going back and saying it IS a sort of supply and demand effect we’re seeing. People aren’t spending in ways the corporations wanted, so now they’re finally lowering some prices. That’s all.
People will do anything to avoid admitting that the free market is working as intended here
Yeah… People just need to start slurping down gruel for every meal and be happy about it. How dare someone complain about grocery store prices when I know for a fact they splurged on a bag of name brand potato chips last week! The poors are not just entitled but completely irresponsible. Don’t they realize simple luxuries like snacks are for rich people?
That’s what a lot of people here and on reddit tell you when you say it’s expensive to cook. Rice and beans, rice and beans, eat your rice and beans every day.
Thanks, I enjoy some occasional rice and beans, but I prefer having a will to live over eating beans every day.
You are not brasilian
I think you misinterpreted what I wrote? I’m not saying people SHOULD reduce their food spending, i’m saying they’ve been kind of forced to, and so in effect that’s why prices are going down. So it IS a supply and demand effect of some kind.
That’s not at all what they said
It sounds like you’re blaming the consumer. As if we could avoid the current cost of living crisis if we just buckled down our spending.
I’m not blaming anyone but the corporations here. My post was simply an observation of what’s happened, but for some reason people are taking it wrong I think.
My post was simply an observation of what’s happened
Using words to follow reality is a threat to many people’s way of thinking because they want their philosophy to remain unchanged, and new information has the possibility of changing their philosophy.
This is why there is often a visceral rejection of someone who just tells the truth
I was going to say the same. Of course there is always a base demand, but there is a reason why 300 years ago fat people were considered wealthy simply because they could buy whatever they wanted for food.
But this discussion is all besides the point. The post says „as soon as we stop buying shit prices go down“, and that is a simple principle of supply demand. I also never stated that this was the sole reason for massively inflated prices, because it‘s not. Again, i was just referring to a thing that was said in the post itself.
The community on here isn‘t really better than on reddit, it‘s all an echochamber as well, which i‘m fine with.
Fortunately there’s enough competition in our food market that food is abundant and cheap. We haven’t had any well-intentioned food redistribution schemes to screw up our market in a long time, so we have a very healthy food market that’s doing a great job of feeding everyone.
It is. It’s partly walking back price gouging (which happened because there was no government there to stop them) and partly a correction for the loss in buying power overly greedy price gouging during high inflation has caused.
No, it’s greed. They aren’t hurting for supply, so there’s no other reason to raise costs other than greed.
But the post says „they stopped buying and price goes down“ reduced demand makes price go down. I‘m not defending corpos or claiming that they‘re not greedy. I‘m just discussing what is stated in this post because it‘s a bad example of greed.
“Supply and demand” refers to the two-way street of scarcity wherein the less “supply” there is, and the more “demand” for the product, the higher the price will be. The point is, if you want to attribute it to “supply and demand”, you need both ends - the scarcity of supply, and a rise in demand. If you have one or the other, but not both, and prices increase, it’s due to other causes.
Attributing price changes to “supply and demand” doesn’t mean it’s being attributed to both (ie supply changes and demand changes), simply that there is now a mismatch between the two
In this case, if supply remains the same, but demand decreases, then the price will go down until they are in equilibrium again
In a terrarium economy. We’re so divorced from actual value this econ 101 stuff barely applies to late stage capitalism.
Yeah we had a temporary scarcity of supply as global production dropped as a result of our attempt to put the economy into a medically induced coma in 2020.
I mean, we also had a massive decrease in competition as a result of that same economic policy. So companies have been more able to step away from the supply and demand curves in terms of pricing, because the natural market got screwed up.
Yeah, lowering prices by itself isn’t evidence that it was just greed all along, they conceivably could be lowering prices to the point that sales on those items are no longer profitable in order to shed inventory because some money (at a loss) is better than no money (at an even bigger loss)
It is. Everybody’s been mis-educated about what free markets are (I think a lot of them actually believe the term means “The market is free to hurt people”), so we get to pretend like we’re discovering basic economics again.
It absolutely is. Which is why the prices of necessities such as food, electricity, water, housing, basic clothing, healthcare and education shouldn’t be up to supply and demand to decide.
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.
Guillotine-themed peaceable assemblies freak out the managerial and executive classes considerably more than an uncoordinated boycott ever could.
Good luck.
Canadians will force our grocers to do the same by crushing loblaws.
Obligatory fuck Loblaw’s.
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.
I mean, just break up the massive corporations. Capitalism requires seller competition in the marketplace in order to provide an incentive to drive down prices. If there are too few players, they can easily make unspoken agreements to fuck over consumers.
The problem is we have historical evidence to show that that doesn’t exactly work. Standard Oil’s broken up parts have mostly been able to informally collude with one another on “turf” and in some cases even defy having been broken up to reacquire each other.
So in the 113 years since they broke up Standard Oil, some of the beneficial effects have worn off?
Darn only a century of benefit. Guess it was a failure because the benefits weren’t eternal.
When exactly did the commenter above you claim that it’s a recent phenomenon? It’s not.
And it becomes increasingly hard to legislate against companies who hold such immense economic power, to the point of being able to buy your private media and ruin your campaign for elections if you threaten them
The oil companies reconglomerated, in part, because we stopped enforcing anti-trust nearly as much as originally intended when we started using the stupid-ass Chicago school of thought from the 1970s onwards. It’s only in the last ten years or so that’s it’s become legally reasonable to say “hey actually the Chicago school of though kinda sucks.” Standard Oil in particular is a bad anti-trust example because Rockefeller was such a personality cult that everyone around him was completely wrapped around his finger. In any case, you can still punish companies for price fixing if you’ve force them to be legally separate, which you can’t do if it’s all one legal organization.
The telecom industry is another example where anti-trust break-ups didn’t lead to more competition, for somewhat similar reasons. They were broken up by geographic regions and each region made gentlemen’s agreements not to expand into each other’s territory. When we stopped enforcing anti-trust as much, they bought each other out.
In general, however, breaking up monopolies is effective, so long as doing so actually creates competition in the marketplace. This is most effective in markets with low barriers to entry or ones where there’s already a large number of smaller companies that are simply too small for meaningful competition with mega-corp. It’s least effective in markets with extremely high barriers to entry or ones where it’s easy to collude and get away with it. In any case, it’s still worth it to break up monopolistic companies because it still reduces their power, even if it does so more effectively in some markets than others. Among other benefits, it makes it easier for new competitors to establish themselves in the market, since their competitors have a harder time utilizing unfair practices the smaller they are.
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
We already have this. It’s called a free market and when you raise prices too high your competition takes all your business. It’s beautiful and everybody hates it due to multiple decades of anti-free-market propaganda.
Found the libertarian
I like how he keeps commenting the same nonsense and people are just ignoring it. Like obviously the “free market” prices for lots of goods were wrong. That’s why people are pissed and companies are being forced to lower them.
Supply and demand do balance out… in the long run. The problem with that is (and what Libertarians never understand) in the long run we are all dead.
Libertarians are all fucking morons. They think humanity will react with good intentions only. It’s a mental disorder.
when you raise prices too high your competition takes all your business
The theory works beautifully… For the first 30 years of capitalism. After a few decades, the more profitable and most competitive companies grow so much through consolidation of the market, that due to sheer economy of scale it becomes impossible to compete with them if you’re not an equally well-established company in the same sector. Oligopolies and monopolies form, and it gets to a point where you can’t outcompete them because the capital investment to be competitive would be so bonkers, and the presence of the two companies creating the same product at such humongous scales would saturate the market so much, that it makes absolutely no sense to try and outcompete them. And even if competition started to really appear, the bigger company buys it and competition is undone again.
You guys live in a parallel world, your axioms of “free market” simply don’t hold up to the slightest scrutiny.
