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this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Here's the report.
https://www.ftc.gov/reports/feeding-america-time-crisis-ftc-staff-report-united-states-grocery-supply-chain-covid-19-pandemic
And here's the why ...
I appreciate the link to the report.
This just further enforces my belief that the FTC doesn't know much about economics. When there's a high demand and limited supply, prices increase. The increase in retail costs, inflation, is used to limit consumer demand. Of course their profits are going to increase; that's how economics works. There's nothing in this report that seems inappropriate.
I think they'd have better luck attacking the CEOs who are pocketing increasingly inflated salaries and bonuses.
This comment just enforces the belief that you don't understand the economy. A temporary small bump in cost during covid due to supply chain issues would be a supply and demand issue but if you've noticed, the bump was not small and it has continued ever since.
You don't get to make record profits and then blame prices on the pandemic. If it was solely due to natural inflation, profits would be similar to past years.
The prices inflated due to the supply shortage during Covid have returned to normal levels. The grocery items which are seeing inflated prices today are due to a number of reasons, mostly due to climate change and animal illness. Every company operates in a manner as to increase profits. The pandemic forced businesses to eliminate jobs while increasing efficiency. So, profits are naturally going to increase.
You must be living in a different planet... Prices have absolutely not gone back to normal
They absolutely have gone back to normal. Here's what most people fail to realize.
The costs for goods were already increasing over the years leading up to the pandemic.
The overnight mass adoption of credit cards and POS subscription services forced small businesses to increase prices by at least 3%.
Families and businesses were doing very well during the pandemic thanks to government subsidies - these subsidies no longer exist.
Livestock illness like bird flu and hoof and mouth are becoming much more common causing a shortage of things like eggs. This leads to increased costs for a dozen eggs plus all the crap we buy that contain eggs.
Climate change is forcing a significant number of farmers to adopt new practices and bring in new crops, if they can survive at all.
The beef industry is just about as corrupt as FIFA.
During the pandemic, there was a push to increase salaries for essential workers. This includes everyone from nurses to dishwashers. We also saw an increase in unions which cause costs to rise for businesses.
I mean, I could go on but the point is that everything has been fucked because of a two year+ global pandemic. Our world has changed. This is the new normal.
Are corporations pocketing more profits? Sure. Are they doing it because of "greed"? I'd like to see an actual congressional investigation to find this out. Yes, of course pharmaceutical companies are gonna pharmaceutical. Of course Wall Street drives corporate planning.
Walking around with the presumption that corporate greed is impacting your grocery bill every week is a little futile. Corporate greed has always existed; okay - maybe a lot more since Regan. But these generalizations without taking a moment to consider the actual economics that impact consumer costs is not going to help us solve the problem.
We need to be concerned about climate change. We need to undo everything Trump did with the EPA. We need to break up the FDA and increase regulations. I mean, as it is today, the FDA is utterly useless and fails to protect anyone but corporations. We need, as a society, to be more concerned about how deregulated capitalism is impacting our environment. We need to voice our opposition to corporate consolidations and get congress to enact stronger regulations.
And we need to vote with our wallets. I understand that a lot of people don't have a choice or feel like they don't have a choice but we need to stop shopping at places like Walmart and Amazon. We need to spend more money at smaller farms and local markets. As we continue not doing so, we're just further empowering these gigantic corporations to take over everything. The more money we spend at Walmart, the more money they have to draft legislation to lobby Congress.
Corporate greed is nothing new. There are added costs in the things we purchase today that didn't exist ten years ago.