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.
I didn’t need a study to tell me that. See, back in 'nam there were no studies, no lettuce, no cars. We did what we did and we knew what we knew.
You don’t say
I’ve been told, once we get ranked choice voting, it will fix all this.
Oh no, this is such a shock. No shit they were lying about inflation. Those bastards were reporting record highs while the average Joe was struggling to pay rent.
To be pedantic, a business that’s keeping the same percentage margins will always post record profits in an inflationary economy.
To be pedantic, all other things being equal, like quantity sold. Riiiiiight?
The best kind of correct.
To be pedantic, profit is theft.
Do you have a job?
If so, do your expect your employer to pay you only the cost of your commute and nothing else?
Do you have a dictionary?
If so, why have you confused revenue with profit?
Profit is the stolen excess after all the shareholders, workers, suppliers and producers have been paid their fair share. If you want to argue that they aren’t being paid a fair share then why is there a profit margin?
Revenue is income. Profit is income minus expenses. Without ANY profit there no motivation to operateva business.
Getting paid a multimillion dollar salary is ‘not motivation’ to run companies like Google and Sony? Huh, could have fooled me. You do know wages are expenses right? Including those of the owners and ceo’s and board, right?
You’re not so stupid as to not know what the definition of profit is in the dictionary, right? You can look it up instead of continuing to be wrong you know.
Let’s say you have an idea for a product that will change the world, but you have no capability to produce it because you’d need access to hundreds of workers and billions’ worth of machinery?
Even supposing you want to be paid nothing for your invention, how do you get it made?
You have to have someone else partner with you to do it. But why should they? If nobody is allowed to profit, then there’s no business reason for an existing company to innovate or change.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Never thought I’d be agreeing with those flash robbing mobs. But here we are
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?
I believe that would be called “redistributing the wealth” given how many stupidly wealthy people claim they couldn’t live on any less.
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.
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.
Literally anyone with a functioning brain already knew this. And yet, there will be no penalty for this bullshit.
Eh with how this conversation has been evolving lately I’d say this is the worst time to be pessimistic about the possibility of regulation. Is a good time to be loud and angry about it tho
They’re not going to change anything because people still need to buy stuff.
I can be pessimistic AND loud & angry.
Loud pessimist is pretty much my entire state of being.
My friends and family must find me exhausting.
no, be pessimistic, the optimistic stance is that hey will magically self regulate
F
I am completely surprised that corporations would lie and cheat and steal to profit.
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.
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
It is if they do it all at once in a coordinated effort
And the damnedest thing is that every corpo does it. So we literally have no choice but to pay higher and higher prices.
The title of this post might as well be “Water is wet, the sky is blue, ice is cold”
Of course corporations are lying to have a reason to raise prices when they don’t need to.
“Hey maybe we should hold corps accountable and stop letting them influence politics–”
“NO. BYDUN”
They will raise it to whatever people will pay. Always. I don’t understand why anyone would even consider what they claim they did it for. They did it for more money, which is exactly what I would do if I ran a for profit business too. If I wanted to help people out of the goodness of my heart, I’d volunteer at a food bank, not start a grocery chain.
I love how this is filled with people pretending that they knew this without being told by someone who actually looked into it.
Unfortunately, even Lemmy is not insulated from science hate
