161–170 of 1001 posts
Meanwhile in Sweden the CEO of ICA, the largest supermarket chain in the country (53% of the market) said yesterday: "It is actually the consumer who controls what they are prepared to pay for a product. In the end, it is they who decide." https://omni.se/icas-vd-det-ar-kunderna-som-avgor-matpriset/...
For reference, that's a fairly average value for Europe at the moment. Not sure why the UK is being singled out. https://i.redd.it/8hbhiqhowjpa1.png
... because it's a UK industry publication, writing about and for the UK?
Demand for food is inelastic, so it makes sense that companies are raising prices as high as possible since people still have to eat. Generally this leads to price competition from other food brands, but when single companies own dozens/hundreds of food brands it’s easy to act like a cartel and keep prices high.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Demand for food overall is inelastic, but the demand for specific foodstuffs is elastic. The measure of inflation we're discussing is across all foodstuffs.
Aren't you just confirming what they said?
Meanwhile in Sweden the CEO of ICA, the largest supermarket chain in the country (53% of the market) said yesterday: "It is actually the consumer who controls what they are prepared to pay for a product. In the end, it is they who decide." https://omni.se/icas-vd-det-ar-kunderna-som-avgor-matpriset/...
The consumer decides what they are prepared to pay for a product, unless the demand is inelastic. And for food overall, the demand is inelastic. Consumers cannot just say "food is too expensive for me, so I think I'm going to to go without it this month". They can choose between the individual products they buy, so it wouldn't be a problem if just some food items got expensive. But the price of food overall is inflat…
I'm a senior programmer with outrageous salary, and I still paused yesterday looking at the price of beef. Went for chicken instead.
I wish inflation numbers would also include things like "percentage of income spent on just living: food and shelter"
A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or not, a weapon wielded by the rich against the middle and lower classes. In an inflationary economy, the winners are rich who have valuable assets whose value skyrocket - think real estate, businesses, etc.
The lower classes rely on A) proportionately much more on fiat, i.e. monthly paycheck going into current and savings account, and B) a blue-collar job, the wage of which always lags further behind inflation than white-collar jobs.
Those two factors combined means that the lower classes get absolutely battered, while the rich just sit gleefully as their asset values balloon and pass down wholesale price increases, etc.
It's the dark, sinister side of inflation, and I think we are all beginning to see the societal tensions that it is breeding, e.g. endless blue-collar UK worker union strikes, riots, protests, etc.
Not saying that it is only one class that is affected, but let's face reality here - the lower class suffers by far the most in this situation.
Is this at least partially Brexit related? For comparison, the US has seen food go up by around 10% over the same time period, which is pretty high but also far from 18%. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/cpi.t02.htm
It feels Europe is becoming increasingly poor and unsafe, and the situation in the UK has worsened quite a bit since the start of Brexit. Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work fo…
Yet another sector where investment is low and prices are high. Over winter tomatoes were in short supply, not because we couldn't grow them, but because the methods of heating greenhouses were too expensive. CO2 heaters use gas in largely uninsulated greenhouses. A bit of creativity (solar thermal with storage supplying radiators) or just modernity (air source heat pumps) would have solved this problem. Alas, there…