Stop buying from these companies. Don’t support their behavior.
I wish it were always easy. Sometimes there’s not much of a choice.
But it’s all of them. I gotta eat.
Meanwhile the Mexican restaurant across the street has me wondering how they can give me so much delicious food for only $8 at a time!
Mexican food scales like there’s no tomorrow. The price per pound of rice or beans for a small bag is drastically higher than the price per pound of rice for a 50 lb bag.
The meat they use is historically cheaper cuts cooked until they’re falling apart. If you can afford to buy non perishables in bulk you can make pretty damn cheap Mexican food as well
Good luck with that unless you plan on moving to Mars or something.
Of course corporations are lying to have a reason to raise prices.
The executives at every corpo would throw a million puppies into a wood chipper if it gained them an extra penny.
I just don’t understand why they lie about it at all? To avoid losing long term customers?
Raising the price of goods to increase profits isn’t illegal. It’s just risky for the business if they lose customers to other places with lower prices.
Price gouging is illegal
I don’t understand how it is enforced, or even could be enforced, in practice. A quick Google indicates they can get away with it if they all do it at once (as in all the grocery stores corps).
Regardless, I can list a dozen eggs for sale and price them at $55000.
For example: For anyone interested I am selling 12 eggs for $55k. Free shipping. DM for details.
I’m not kidding. Will legit send eggs to anyone anywhere in North America. Just PayPal me.
Edit: been a few days and the offer still stands. No government officials have messaged me to indicate it’s illegal yet lol…because it’s not except under very specific circumstances
And the damnedest thing is that every corpo does it. So we literally have no choice but to pay higher and higher prices.
It is if they do it all at once in a coordinated effort
The title of this post may as well have been “Water is wet, ice is cold”
Of course corpos are lying to have a reason to raise prices.
So you’re telling me it doesn’t cost twice as much to make and ship charcoal. It doesn’t cost three times as much to grow a head of lettuce? Those sneaky snooks who make house paint have some 'splaining to do too.
Straight to the moon, Sherwin Williams!
For lettuce, the cost of fertilisers, pesticides, fungicides etc, rose significantly this year. At least in Europe.
You don’t say
Duh. Finance bros will still tell you different though.
Surely it’s not the shambolic government monetary policy of the same period, the companies were just being way greedier than normal. This study was run by the IMF.
They will tell you it’s because of the increase in wages, and then refuse to believe the data when you show them that wages have stagnated.
I am completely surprised that corporations would lie and cheat and steal to profit.
In a market that expects infinite growth in a finite reality, I can assure you that I’m not the least bit surprised that companies are using “inflation” as an excuse to gouge their customers for what increasingly little they have
the $7 per gallon gas prices and my previous boss forcing me to drive 50 miles to work with a car that was going to give out any moment soon…
piece of shit humans
I didn’t need a study to tell you that. In my industry the costs of all my goods are up roughly 30% since 2020, but my margins have gotten thinner at the same time so my revenue somehow managed to magically remain exactly the same. And it’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that the manufacturers are the ones who determine the Minimum Advertising Price I’m supposed to be selling at.
If that 30% number sounds awfully familiar, you’ll find it in the linked article. So, profits for megacorporations rose 30%, and my costs rose 30%, too. Gee, will you look at that. Those two numbers are the same. That’s a fuckin’ puzzler, isn’t it?
So some asshole somewhere in that supply chain pyramid is making a lot of money off of this “inflation” excuse, and it sure as hell isn’t me.
I’m sure you get to be the grief sponge from people upset about higher costs and lower quality, too. I had the hardest time getting Levi’s to honor a warranty for two pairs of jeans that fell apart after three months. The whole time I was getting more frustrated with the company while feeling terrible for their customer service meat shields who weren’t allowed to resolve it.
It’s because there hasn’t been any meaningful anti trust enforcement for decades. Every industry is basically an oligopoly at this stage, so they can set whatever price they want, because they know their competitors will do the same (because they face the exact same pressures from the exact same shareholders to increase profits).
If it was a free market, you could’ve found a different supplier, but obviously there was no alternative, or you would’ve done just that.
In almost all cases I buy manufacturer direct. You are correct that there is no alternate supplier.
The only viable plan B is to start my own manufacturing company and make my own damn products, which is a capital expense I strongly suspect most players in my industry will not be able to afford. I certainly can’t.
free markets build monopolies, the only reason we are only at oligopoly is that we still have some regulation on the market (that inherently makes it not free btw)
True, without regulation the market will always trend towards a monopoly.
Oligopolies that run both horizontally and vertically up the supply chain.
This is what happens after decades of mergers and acquisitions in the name of diversification, and corruption of regulators and governments — a small number of multinationals, owned by an even smaller number of oligarchs, reach a point of control where it is relatively easy to collude with the handful of others that collectively own 90% of every market and sector, and operate as a functional monopoly.
It’s the OPEC-ification of the entire global economy. It is of no surprise that fossil fuel oligarchs applied that model to everything, nor that the governments they own continue to enable their crimes. We’re all hostages to the economic terrorists of capitalism.
Great comment, sincerely - completely nails it. My only nitpick (and only delivered cuz you clearly care) is I don’t think it should be called terrorism.
Terrorism, as hate-fueled and damaging as it is, at least has an ethos, an organizing principle, a (generally twisted, but coherent) morality. These monsters have nothing so human to stand behind. As you know, it’s nothing more complicated than “fuck every life on earth but mine, for no reason more compelling than that I want even more stuff”. Terrorists actually compare favorably against that.
Lets call it cancer then
Growth to the detriment of literally everything around it
It’s just the natural state of capitalism. Regulation can keep it in check, but regulation will eventually falter, then fail due to regulatory capture and weakening of safeguards by politicians sympathetic to capital (read: bribed by).
Ayyyy I got most of my price lists in for next year and it’s like 5% across the board which is pretty typical. Some raw materials have come back down and ocean freight is reasonable again.
I got one of the last pricelists in today and it’s like 30% increase over this year 😂 I’m gonna put in one more PO at '23 prices then I’m dropping their shit.
I want a well curated list of the worst offenders so I can figure out who to stop giving my money to.
Bingo! Boycott time!
You will be surprised how difficult that plan is to implement. Pretty much everything is owned by a few mega corporations.
They didn’t say to stop getting stuff from there… just to stop giving them money
Don’t worry, we’ll give our best efforts, just get us the list.
2000s vibes. Probably mostly still accurate but like… So many enormous companies not present.
Is 5 gum still gum?
anything owned by: Nestlé, oil, BlackRock, Bezos, etc…
Vive la révolution. 🏴☠️
- Everyone. —End of List.
This is my surprised face.
:|
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The Nordics I think figured out a solution to this,
You might be familiar with all the classic arguments decrying rent controls for causing supply shortages as people refuse to give up their RCd housing,
Well up in northern Europe they don’t have rent control, they have rent hike control, basically you can only raise rent by a given percentage at most per year, in the US, we could tie that percentage cap to the percent change change in federal interest rates, pass some of that market rally back to the consumers since a rate drop leads to a mandatory profit margin drop to match.
The Nordics I think figured out a solution to this,
The French did too, it’s called the guillotine.
That actually didn’t help much of anything
Catharsis may feel nice but prioritizing feeling validated over addressing the problems you want to feel so valid about just leaves you feeling valid about a still festering wound.
Can we do both? Murder some of the ultra wealthy and also make systemic improvements?
An environment that allows the indiscriminate murder of an entire class is one that is inherently too lawless to organize systemic improvements to the root causes of institutional problems.
Like I said Catharsis feels nice but helps nothing.
I believe that would be called “redistributing the wealth” given how many stupidly wealthy people claim they couldn’t live on any less.
This exists in a few places in the US under the term “rent stabilization” but it is not tied to interest rates or inflation and exactly who qualifies gets a little murky. Considering that housing is a basic human necessity I think some form of rent stabilization should exist everywhere. Market forces have their place but they are often disadvantageous to lower incomes and should be curtailed when we’re talking something that people can’t do without.
Well see that’s why I tied it to be directly related to the federal interest rate, as a balance to create class interests for both courses of action.
Basically it’d be a way to ensure the fed doesn’t get pressured too much to pursue bad interest rate policy like never raising it over 20 years until it’s too late and everyone’s mad about it.
The beginnings of a list:
“The biggest perpetrators were energy companies like Shell, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron, which were able to enjoy massive profits last year”
If you can find any way to go electric, use petrol less, ride a bike, walk, use a train, avoid a plane, etc, go for it. Prolly the petrol corps won’t notice your individual actions, but the carbon you’ll keep out of the atmosphere might just help to keep our planet’s ecosphere viable.The Study itself: INFLATION, PROFITS AND MARKET POWER TOWARDS A NEW RESEARCH AND POLICY AGENDA - https://www.ippr.org/files/2023-12/1701878131_inflation-profits-and-market-power-dec-23.pdf - Jeebus, 32 pages!
the carbon you’ll keep out of the atmosphere might just help to keep our planet’s ecosphere viable.
Imagine going to the world’s largest landfill and picking up a single pellet of Styrofoam. If you, all your family, and all your friends went off the grid and used zero oil or electricity, that’s about the impact you’d have.
Individual action means jack shit when corporations are OVERWHELMINGLY responsible. Oh you got your entire city to start walking more? That’s great. Too bad a nearby chemical fire just put out more emissions in 2 days than a city full of cars would put out over 2 years. That’s the kind of BS we’re dealing with. Heavy industry regulation is the only solution, and anyone saying otherwise is lying or has their head up their ass.
I drive electric and in my home state of Georgia, USA they have an ad valorem tax of 239 dollars or there abouts for people that drive Evs and plug in hybrids.
My theory is that they’re missing out on the taxes I would normally pay if I bought gas and need to recoup their losses.
I used to live in Texas and they did the same shit there. Tax EVs more because their owners weren’t “paying their fair share on the highway tax”
My theory is that they’re missing out on the taxes I would normally pay if I bought gas and need to recoup their losses.
I don’t think you need to refer to that as a theory. Taxes on fuel for motor vehicles go towards road maintenance. Vehicles that drive on the roads but don’t burn gas or diesel, don’t pay their share of the road maintenance costs. That’s why states want to tax EVs.
but the carbon you’ll keep out of the atmosphere might just help to keep our planet’s ecosphere viable.
This is only if nations stop burning oil even if it’s cheap.
Nations aren’t going to stop burning oil until it’s too expensive.
That’s why oil should have the cost of climate change and healthcare from pollution added to it. If oil was as expensive as the true cost, we’d have ditched it decades ago.
I totally agree, but the people we put in power don’t care about the true cost because we don’t.
Collectively speaking, anyways.
