I mean, that’s 4 years of our lives taken! 4 years of opportunities that were more challenging because they wanted a number on a computer to go up! 4 years of feeling worse than necessary about my finances and management of them and general personhood because i felt like i couldn’t afford anything because everything was priced egregiously!
And now they’re saying ‘oh well we fixed it now’. Fuck you!!! Get over yourselves! Holy shit, I can’t wait to happily be friends with the giant corporations again!! Just the arrogance that we’re happy to once again be at their beck and call because they changed the numbers they could’ve always changed. Sickening.
And I feel like I have a brain disease because i’ve been worrying and posting for years about how disgusting it is that they’re just cranking the numbers up to see what’ll happen and obviously no one will stop them because this is an oligarchy — and i kept getting well-ackshullyied into the ground by esteemed logical posters explaining how supply chains work. Well look at this shit you motherfuckers!
Just the amount of incredibly deep and sophisticated social engineering is so disgusting:
It’s a savvy play for shifting perceptions of value, crucial for consumers in the decision-making process of where to shop for bread and eggs. Customers benefit by saving some money; retailers possibly benefit even more by being known as the company that magnanimously trimmed prices.
Go to hell, stop shifting my value perception. I should be able to decide what I feel about milk or zucchini. When I think about a croissant I should be thinking about France, not Target pricing strategies.
Most importantly, the theater of making grand pronouncements about lower prices is great for retailers’ reputations. Forget about all the price hikes grocery retailers and food brands implemented in the last few years — now companies would like consumers to focus on the savings they’re offering. “They’re all leaning into this inflation-oriented messaging,” says Stambor, which he notes is interesting because food inflation isn’t high at the moment. It’s the accumulation of past inflation that we’re still feeling the sting of; the prices just didn’t come down.
And we’re meant to thank them for this! I hope to god they can’t put the genie back in the bottle with this. I won’t forget 2020, I’ll hate these bloodsuckers til the day I die.
So the “free market” has been so consolidated into large mega-corps that they just price fix now without fear of punishment because they’re too big to fail or have such deep pockets that they own the political landscape.
Free market just means free to squeeze the remaining middle class until there’s nothing left.
It turns out the supply & demand story of economics is basically horseshit, and if you look at how the economy works scientifically - which in this case just means paying attention to what actually happens and letting that shape your theories rather than demanding that your theories are correct and patching them ad-hoc to pretend you were always right - then essentially inflation is caused by price setters just hiking prices.
https://strangematters.coop/supply-chain-theory-of-inflation/
This is a decent interview with the authors where they also talk about how orthodox economists gatekeep their theories and launder other’s theories so they never have to admit they were wrong:
So yeah, you’re not crazy, it is just corporations using their price setting powers to shit on us, and economists giving them cover.
If we still had “real” competition, this wouldn’t have happened. Even during the pandemic competition would’ve/should’ve kept prices normal-ish. But of course we all know this isn’t how it works. Turns out that if a dozen or so companies own the grand majority of whatever their industry is, they behave like monopolists. Who could’ve possibly predicted such a thing?
There was this bearded fellow in the 1800’s, but I’m sure he had no idea what he was talking about.
This is another story that orthodox economics tells, but the supply chain model takes competition into account and appears to operate in its presence.
Monopoly is a problem, but even the story that competition keeps prices down is a false one.
100%. Unfortunately, somewhere down the line, American style neoclassical economics because simply “economics” or even worse “just basic economics.” Suddenly tax breaks for the rich became the all curing treatment for any economic ailment.
Too much money to spend on healthcare? Tax cuts for the rich.
Too little money to spend on healthcare? Also tax cuts for the rich.
In terms of fixing every problem even, I’m yet to hear what it can’t do.
My favourite was when you had every economically illiterate stock bro in existence claiming along the lines of “no, I’ve glanced at a couple of margin calculations i made for 2 companies, at one point in the supply chain, and, as such, I know price gouging couldn’t possibly have happened.” They dont know enough about inventory keeping to explain to them that they can’t tell either way, bless them.
I recall Bush II starting his first term saying that the economy was doing so great that we had a budget surplus, and that had to be given back to the people* via tax breaks.
Then, before that could happen, the economy hit the shitter, and he said we needed to encourage the economy to recover by giving tax breaks to the people*.
It’s amazing how tax breaks just fix everything.
* The rich people, of course.
We got robbed blind during the pandemic. Not just in terms of price gouging, mind you. There’s a reason that billionaires’ cumulative wealth went up with the exact same amount it went down for ALL THE REST OF US. 95% of all dollars in existence were “minted” (digitally, ofc) in the last couple of years. That essentially means the dollar in your pocket is already worth just a few CENTS, you just don’t know it yet. But we will.
These are some of the same fuckers who took on bad investments in 2007, knowing the investments were shit, and crashed the worldwide economy in 2008. Millions lost their homes and life savings over night. Then the govt. bailed them out, the poor banks and their little oops, with our money and they laughed all the way into the “too big to fail” book of cock-knobbery.
They don’t care about how we perceive them and a vast number of consumers, sadly, cannot be bothered to go without the creature comforts they enjoy to send a message so nothing will change. Same thing will happen with real estate when that bottom finishes falling out. Too bad consumers gotta pay for the huber of the wealthy.
It’s interesting isn’t it? If society as a whole does better and we all get some extra money to spend then people get greedy and begin jacking up their prices to restore a previous status quo.
It seems clear that an effective government would’ve stepped in to stop the price gouging but that goes against our neoliberal leaders worldview.
Its worth recognizing that our quality of life is heavily predicated on the subsidy of cheap labor abroad. As markets move international and these historical serfs begin to move into the consumer side of the market, we’re seeing a rise in global demand. And as big businesses consolidate ownership of real estate and productive capital, we’re seeing a drop in the number of suppliers. That gives the business end of the spectrum enormous leverage. But its only one side of the equation.
This isn’t strictly a problem of profits. Big western states like the US and Canada produce enormous amounts of domestic waste. We’ve monetized that waste, such that you can turn a profit by simply consuming large quantities of excess energy and raw materials, and translate that into paper assets that can be borrowed against in a historically low-interest lending market. But in the end, a big part of the reason everything is getting so expensive is that we’ve been eating our own seed corn.
When you pollute your groundwater with chemical waste from fossil fuels and plastics, that’s going to drive up the cost of agriculture and potable water utilities. When you burn off all the cheap fuels and refuse to invest in green/nuclear alternatives (because fossil fuels generate enormous profit margins and green/nukes don’t) then the cost of energy rises. When you build horizontally rather than vertically, refuse to invest in mass transit, and force everyone to make enormous commutes, real estate starts selling at an exceptional premium.
Yeah, there’s definitely an element of greed in the mix. But it can’t be discounted how much of our domestic wealth is squandered through mismanagement. Americans need twice the income of their German or Korean peers to live half as good, because we do everything so haphazardly.
It’s what we vote for. Everytime someone suggests European solutions they’re branded a communist and we vote in the “greed is good” guy.
