Now competition has been consolidated away.
With the pandemic, corporations have accidentally entered into an experiment leading to new price discovery. Without competitors, all that’s in the way of increasing prices is consumers’ willingness to buy.
You can't blame the voters for this, the institutions are long ago corrupted.
[0]https://pnhp.org/news/gilens-and-page-average-citizens-have-...
If two brands of cereal are owned by the same parent company, they aren't really competitors.
If one hundred parent companies are owned by the same investment index fund, whose management votes on behalf of its investors, are those hundred companies really competitors with each other?
Every other aisle is the same story. Two or three companies, with a few small groups also throwing a hat in the ring.
The grocery store is also owned by one of two companies, with again, a couple small time competitors that haven't been purchased yet.
Something like "trustflation" would be a better name. Want to reduce prices by allowing/encouraging corporations to consolidate their supply chains? Maybe that's a good short term trade off. But prepared for the inevitable trustflation when your too-big-to-fail, risk-averse monster can now hike prices as it sees fit.
That's exactly what happened before.
During the Nixon recession, leading up to the wage & price freeze.
And after the freeze was lifted, the financial power imbalance was no different so inflation went even wilder due to pent-up un-fulfilled greed among the financial leaders whom had to do without growth for a little while there.
Even though the value of the dollar was declining due to destabilization, there were less available for the majority of workers/taxpayers, but financialists still needed more of them or the math would have made them look like their greed had failed like never before. They are rewarded on greed numerically in ways that everyone else can not compare.
The freeze worked to cement the imbalance leading to the exaggerated wealth inequality we have now.
The more apparent income inequality today is minor by comparison, but they were both locked in like never before mainly by pure unchecked greed.
Freezing prices didn't help much, but freezing wages even for a little bit was completely counterproductive by setting the workers/taxpayers back many more years by comparison to capital.
Those years have grown to generations now.
There is plenty of evidence of consolidation. For most recent one look up analysis on spike of price of eggs. The egg production turned out to be controlled by just a few conglomerates. Which were able to take advantage of (small to almost non-existent) loss of chickens and voila. Price of eggs is non-elastic; that is, you can't easily replace it with other products and it is an important part of Western diet, so people didn't have a choice but to pay up.
https://thehumaneleague.org/article/how-many-chickens-are-in...
Approx 58 million chickens have been culled in the United States due to bird flu.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/avianflu/avian-flu-summary.htm
The first link seems to be specific to meat birds, but I think the concept stands for layers too.
In that light, the loss of 58 million chickens to flu is a very different kind of shock.
[1] https://unitedegg.com/facts-stats/#:~:text=U.S.%20Egg%20Prod.... [2] https://extension.umn.edu/small-scale-poultry/raising-chicke....
I mean if you go just a few hundred years back I'm 100% sure consolidation was worse because lords and kings owned everything. It remains to be seen if it was better during the 1800s and 1900s but my searching skills aren't coming up with much.
I don't know offhand of any specific and scientific measures of consolidation, but it's painfully clear from observation that over the past 40 years, we have had a massive wave of consolidation in many sectors. Just as one example, I recently saw a chart of consolidation in the (book) publishing industry, where dozens of publishers consolidated into several, and then into the big 4 we have today. Similarly, there are a number of fairly widely-circulated charts of the few companies that own nearly all of the various food and household product brands in the US and in Europe.
These are widely-known and well-documented phenomena, and it should be easy to find evidence if you go looking for it at all.
As for the most recent spike in price of eggs a quick search showed
https://farmaction.us/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Farm-Action...
which yes, is prepared by the smaller competitors of the larger conglomerates, but it does present some factual information. Including very small decrease in egg production, high degree of industry consolidation, with one company controlling about 20% of the entire market (and the company saw 600% increase in profits).
Here
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daniellenierenberg/2023/01/27/c...
you can see more analysis and other examples of industries that are even more consolidated, e.g., 4 companies control 70% of the pork producing market, other 4 companies control about 80% of beef producing market.
Look at finance. Look at IT. Consolidation is everywhere. It is natural direction of free markets and, if left unchecked, causes massive disruptions of free market mechanisms.