Are greedy companies to blame for grocery inflation? We looked at the data
npr.org
npr.org
Rather, economic circumstances changed and the amount of money they can get away with charging increased.
People running companies don’t know everything about what will happen when they change something, and don’t have the resources to try out every idea. They definitely don’t perfectly optimize profit.
The effects are somewhat similar to collusion, but this is completely legal because the companies aren't communicating directly.
Pricing out the lower classes, is part of capitalism. The relatively affluent can afford increased prices to the point that it has outpaced a larger and larger portion of the population. In American Capitalism, if you can get efficient enough, industry will always cater and price to a higher paid customer base than the mean.
look at all the streaming services simultaneously raising prices, adding or increasing ads, _and_ reneging on account sharing..
The pandemic altered a lot of spending and consumption habits (and minted some trillionaires in the process) - tendency is for corps (or boards) to want to see growth above all, so if you have the massive uptick some saw in a global pandemic how do you keep adding annual growth if not by shrinkflation or similar?
That aspect was not covered. It treats the subject as if consumers would keep buying the same exact list of items despite the price going up.
If you really think that greed is the cause of inflation--well be the change you want to see :-) Just go in and tell your employer you want to reduce your salary by 10% because you think inflation is getting too high.
To be less 'virtue-signal-y', I will admit that now that I've fixed my credit score I'll be reconsidering the balance; your boy is tired of renting.
I, however, differ in the sense RE: change. I think companies more viciously seek profits to appease shareholders. There is such a thing as 'too optimal'
Competition should temper this more than it did, but didn’t.
My money’s on “incredibly high levels of concentration of ownership in both food production and food retail”. A stupid fraction of the stuff on shelves is made by a handful of companies. We used to just assume this kind of thing was bad and break those kinds of things up well before they hit this level of concentration, but stopped doing that in the ‘70s, and here we are, with most industries dominated by a tiny number of players, including food.
It's honestly embarrassing how concentrated ownership of food has become.
Here is the Abstract CHAPTER 5 The Monopoly Enigma, the Reagan Administration's Antitrust Experiment, and the Global Economy from the book: Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture "In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration drastically altered American antitrust policy, virtually eliminating Section 2 cases involving monopolies. This chapter provides a context for that decision by tracing the efforts that the federal government made since 1890 to reconcile an opposition to highly concentrated economic power with the even stronger enthusiasm Americans have always had for the economic success they associated with the nation's largest enterprises. In this setting, judges and government lawyers struggled over the years to come up with a clear concept of monopoly. In the global economy of the late 20th century, the Reagan policy innovation solved that problem and proved to be timely and significant. The new policy allowed American firms to get up to global scale, either through strategic alliances or through mergers that would not have been allowed under previous administrations"
I also would rather not see CEOs making such massive paychecks, but if that's what the market is willing to pay them I don't see a clear way to stop it.
Which, among other things, means returning to aggressive antitrust enforcement that we haven’t seen in decades.
Totally agree there. To me that's a problem, but I know for many they see that as a good thing.
> When all grocery stores jack up prices, what choice do people have?
A rather surprising fact about food, it doesn't just come from grocery stores. Farmers markets, gardening, hunting, raising chickens, etc are absolutely options.
Almost all of human history was devoid of grocery stores entirely. Local markets are a different story, but then you are often dealing with people from your community and not massive corporations that don't know who you are and only care about profit.
I very much agree with how you describe our system. Though I would see that as the fundamental problem to fix, something like grocery stores acting like greedy corporations is a tiny, distracting problem when its part of a system that has hints of slavery.
You’ve never seriously tried those things.
Farmers market prices? Get out.
Gardening? The time investment to keep a garden large enough to make a significant dent in one’s grocery bill is prohibitive.
Have fun having your life revolve around raising livestock.
Hunting, maybe if you live near public game lands, have the tools and desire to butcher your own meat.
In all cases the economies of scale in industrial farming trumps local operations.
I also have a pretty large garden, we don't spend all that much time on it. We don't plant as intensively as most people think about. We don't till and keep the dirt bare, its more of a food forest at this point but we do still plant annual produce in rows in some areas. We spend maybe 3 hours per week total in the garden during the summer.
Raising livestock doesn't mean your life has to revolve around them, its all up to how you choose to raise them and what you raise.
> In all cases the economies of scale in industrial farming trumps local operations.
Have you ever been to an industrial farm, feed lot, chicken house, or slaughterhouse? If not I'd hold judgement on the value of that scale until you see how the animals are actually raised and treated. I'd extend that to crop fields as well, though its harder to empathize with what a plant when they're so different from us.
There is no position that you can't fill for 10M. You can find people to run entire nations as well as brain surgeons and rocket scientists for less.
You could take every dollar from the most obscenely rich in the US and you could only afford to find the US government for 6 months. We simply spend too much to fix it by taxing the rich to death.
The question is one of capitalism and free markets versus Marxism and price controls.
For us left means "liberal", though with again a different definition that isn't rooted in liberty, or " progressive", which is a horribly confusing term that seems to imply you believe incremental change is always the best approach.
Right here means "conservative", though again the definition there has gotten confusing over my lifetime.
I think its a fair argument, though, that because we have been capitalist from the beginning and don't have any history with communism in our system, the traditional left/right split is less helpful here.
Most of the policies I've seen proposed lately have a very Marxist or communist feel to them. Personally I'm not willing to go down that road as a solution, though I'd love solutions that don't go to such extremes.
It doesn't help discussion to mislabel every form of government intervention as communism.
It frames things every functional government does as somehow a slippery slide towards the USSR.
Price controls, central planners allocating resources, even universal basic income are all ideas that are very much inline with Marxism.
In this case, the umbrella complaint is that people perceive businesses to have used their power, in various ways simultaneously during both long-term and short-term declines (and sometimes, in the worst cases, just because they can), to suffer less than individuals in relative terms. People obviously dislike this (if it's true).
Maybe this specific look at grocers is or is not a good example - but regardless, you've spoken broadly, and I frankly find it a little hard to believe that you literally "don't understand".
Odds are that the truth is somewhere in between.