Multinationals in particular hiked prices far above rise in costs to deliver an outsize impact on cost of living crisis, report concludes
Inflation roughly averages 8% over the last couple years. The price of milk has gone up 300%. These are not the same.
To be fair, milk specifically should cost a lot more than it does because our dairy agricultural system is disgustingly abusive to cattle.
It’s also heavily subsidized
They’re subsidized heavily which keeps consumer costs down, but not sure why that should also lead to abusing treatment
is disgustingly abusive to cattle.
Also to humans. I am pretty sure there is no minimum wage law in dairy in the US.
I don’t have receipts to prove it but I don’t think the price of milk has changed all that much. I just got a gallon for like $2.70. Earliest receipt I can find is from Feb of last year and I actually paid a bit more.
This is what happens when you fail to enforce anti-trust law.
This is what happens when most people think the disparity in wealth should grow.
I would love someone to include Canada in these studies. With significantly lower wages than in the US and with the many quasi monopolies in many sectors like telecom and grocery chains and food, I’d like to know how bad Canadians were affected.
Apparently, at least for groceries, there’s an estimated extra $700/year increase next year, with food costs slowing to 2.5-4.5% increases in general, but sticking at 5-7% for bread, vegetables, and meat. It’s still going to cost an average 4-person family $16.3k a year for groceries, though (AKA just over half a full-time minimum-wage salary, prior to paying taxes).
Metro reported a 14% increase in profits for their last quarter compared to last year, and Loblaw’s 11%. According to Google’s earning statements of the last year, Metro has made 27.4% more profits in the last four quarters than they reported in 2020. Loblaws, on the other hand, is actually down 12%, though Google reports they had two really bad quarters this year, and posted a 40% increase in profits between FY 2022 and 2020. So yeah, nothing as egregious as the article, but they’re still outpacing (year over year for the last quarter) both regular and grocery inflation.
I’m sure if I really wanted to, I could dig up the same financial information for Soebys, but I have no clue if Walmart and Costco would keep clean financials readily available for Canada.
Holy shit. Thanks for that.
Chiming in from Australia, our two main supermarket chains (practically a combined monopoly) turned bumper profits over the last year while inflation has been out of control.
The only good news is one of the minor political parties is trying to push an inquiry into how they managed to make significantly higher than usual profits whilst customers are buying only the absolute essentials and farmers are saying that the price they get for groceries & meat hasnt gone up. However it is a minor party with some power, but not enough to force anything to happen without support from a major party and/or a lot of independants, so we will see how that goes
I feel like what happens in both Canada and Australia are like mirror reflections. Except you have a season where everything carries la catches on fire while ours everything freezes over.
No war but the class war
It’s nice they used the word Boosted in the headline.
I was almost mad at the runaway greed of capitalism, but boost just sounds so much nicer than raise.
Not to mention “gouge”.
They decided they deserved to make up all the profit they lost during the pandemic, and they were legally able to increase our prices to do exactly that. It’s as plain and simple as this.
I seem to recall earlier in the year so called “economists “ were telling everyone it wasn’t.
Or predicting 7 out of the last 4 recessions
Yesterday we were shopping at Target and in the frozen aisle they had a sign for the Favorite Day ice cream sandwiches, “Everyday low price $4.99”.
The price on the shelf label, $4.69. Whoops!
No shit
Correct, this is literally how market economics works. The real question is why they weren’t able to do it before, since they had the incentive already (and always do).
Didn’t have a good excuse.
People had a lot more cash on hand after the pandemic, and then wages rose.
I’m sure another 40 years of electing Democrats and Republicans will fix it.
Lol I mean this is literally what inflation is.
It’s not just some thing that happens. People realize they can make more money, so they do. Happens at every step in the supply chain, and thus prices go up across the supply chain.
Prices are set at the limit of what the market will pay
Oh no. Not for essentials and definitely not in our current economic environment. Our economy isn’t designed to have people spend money only on essentials. When people only spend money on rent and food or whole economy is on danger of collapsing.
You’re discussing how things could or should be.
I am discussing the mechanics of inflation
No… Well not in a detailed way and ignores greed. So which would your definition go under demand-pull inflation, cost-push inflation, or built-in inflation.
Greed is an aspect of any inflation because inflation is explicitly tied to demand.
It’s silly to try to moralize economic concepts.
“Ignores greed”
Greed is always a factor though, this isn’t a new variable to account for. All three categories you provided have a profit motive as the core factor, it’s simply in different layers.
A real example of inflation that isn’t tied to an individuals desire to maximise their benefits from a transaction would be something like extracting an ore than becomes harder as the rich deposits are used up.
Always with worst possible take no matter the subject.
