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Comment by phenkdo | Hacker News Reader

do you also look forward to the 10x grocery shit-bill you will be stuck with?

Numbers I've read is that farm labour accounts for ~10% of retail food cost for fruits.

https://www.prb.org/usfarmworkersfoodprices/

If that doubles because they have to pay local labour rates, the price would go up 10%. Possibly less if it just eats into the margins through the rest of the chain.

We might also see a shift toward less laborious foods, which is fine by me.

You realise such transitions take crop cycles - if the current crops fail because lack of labour and it leads to a food shortage food prices will go through the roof.

...and not to mention everything is interconnected in an economy. If food prices rise by x%, there is a cascade effect on the prices of everything, not just groceries.

It frequently goes the other way. If people are spending more on food that lowers the demand for services which thus lowers those services costs. Housing for example is limited by people’s ability to pay for it, with clear long term trends showing an inverse relationship between housing costs and food costs.

PS: In the short term inflation and deflation can be caused by a huge range of effects, but in the long term it’s bound by government spending and taxation.

Farming doesn't strike me as high margin. This increase in costs could send many farmers out of business. That will push up food prices.

Seems unlikely, the operations would probably just be consolidated with another agribusiness company. "Farmers" are something of an anachronism in most of the agricultural supply chain.

Tomatoes are not very expensive to begin with. While rents have gone up significantly, food hasn't as much. People spend a much smaller proportion of their income for groceries nowadays than a few decades ago. Maybe this will change.

Sure if it means people are being paid a fair wage. I should pay more for things where I'm exploiting labor tbh.

Somehow I think your keyboard bravado will vanish once you start paying 60-70% of salary for just basic necessities. And even if I were to concede that you - presumably high paid tech workers - were willing & able, imagine the fate of the pensioners, bus drivers, retail workers...they barely make ends meet as it is.

So we should continue exploiting, is what you are saying?

I am not thrilled about the situation, but the alternative, unfortunately, is far worse. The people in Ukraine/Moldova etc. will go deeper into poverty, and people in the west will have to contend with sky-high inflation.

One reason for poverty is because active people are working in foreign countries.

Isn't the point of this change to give farm workers (who like bus drivers, retail workers, etc barely make ends meet) the ability to cover their basic needs more easily. If we could implement this across all low-paid jobs, I would more than happily pay a greater proportion of my own salary on these goods.

Things already are expensive and with all the automation the salaries make up a crazy tiny amount of it.

have you read the article?

Asparagus are pretty labor intense. Apparently last year NL markets forced the price down to half of what it costs to grow them while prices in the store stay the same.[1]

Say a kilo of asparagus costs 6 euro in the store and has about 16 spears.[2] Say field work in pays 12 euro, 32 spears or 2 kg. One employee harvests 30 kg per hour on average.[3]

2 kg worth of pay for the worker and 15 kg vanished into the market? 40 cents of the 6 euro goes to the field worker which is a lot!

I would love to pay 6.40 for my asparagus if they raise the pay to 24 euro.

I would also quit my job and go work there.

(In Spain the asparagus might be cheaper, have more spears in a kg, people earn 3 euro per hour and they might be less productive. It's hard to calculate from here)

[1] - https://www.1limburg.nl/prijs-asperges-dramatisch-laag-helft...

[2] - https://www.ah.nl/producten/product/wi99045/ah-asperges-wit

[3] - http://www.engelsmachines.nl/EN

The free variable that consumes all available spending money tends to be rent. If food prices go up, I'd expect real estate prices to stop growing so fast. It would be a welcome change.

Well, alternatively you’re just paying people slave wages to do this work so you can have cheaper groceries. Don’t forget that.

The labor during harvest is significant, but not that significant. Even at a 40% hike for harvest labor costs, you wouldn't see a 40% increase in price. And it would actually be good for the local economy, but bad for the workers from Eastern Europe, they depend on harvest season.

Yes.

Related, tfw you pay the one remaining person running Prime Now deliveries a $100 tip in the hopes that they keep working because there's fucking nobody left even though Amazon said it'll pay associates an extra $2/hour. xDD

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