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UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

grocerygazette.co.uk

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Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#411

Post by jollyllama »

nosianu wrote: post #310
illiarian wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But the price of food overall is inflating. 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"

Looking at the conditions that "beef" is raised in - feedlots specifically - the price for beef is way too low. Of course it should be raised by laws requiring better living conditions for the animals, not by the operations staying the same but making more profit. Same for all kinds of meat really. I happily eat meat, and of the more pricey variety and not the cheapest I can get, but I'm willing to pay the price (and…

Yeah, but that hasn't been done, so the price has gone up for some other reason.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#412

Post by misja111 »

lifty wrote: post #228
samhuk wrote: post #167

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation. A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or…

Tell that to the economists, who predominantly say that inflation helps the poor, supposedly because they have loans.

That assumes that their salaries keep track with inflation and that the interest on their loans doesn't.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#413

Post by swarnie »

mike-cardwell wrote: post #381
Veen wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In general there seems to be a weird zeitgeist of negative exceptionalism in the UK at the moment. Especially on Hacker News. I tend to avoid UK-based posts on here because the content is fairly predictable: the UK is going to shit and Brexit is to blame, repeated ad nauseam in the absence of any evidence that it's true. If I wanted thoughtless UK doom mongering, I'd read the Guardian or the NYT.

If you think HN is bad, you should spend 5 minutes looking at the state of the UnitedKingdom subreddit.

It has its moments. Just don't engaged in politics, social issues, economics or international relations.

Actually what I'm describing is casualuk which is even wore for its banality some how.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#414

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

cs702 wrote: post #403
samhuk wrote: post #167

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation. A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or…

> In an inflationary economy, the winners are rich who have valuable assets whose value skyrocket - think real estate, businesses, etc. Actually, it's the opposite that is happening, because central banks have aggressively raised interest rates to bring inflation under control. When rates rise, the net present value of every long-term cash-earning asset declines, and those individuals and businesses (including banks)…

Isn't the problem with raising interest rates that the rich with savings have assets that improve and the poor with debts have loans that get worse?

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#415

Post by gizajob »

tantalor wrote: post #279
samhuk wrote: post #167

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation. A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or…

> the lower class suffers by far the most This is a tautology. The lower class is defined that way. If they didn't suffer the most, they wouldn't be lower class.

It’s not exactly a tautology, technically.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#416

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

tantalor wrote: post #279
samhuk wrote: post #167

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation. A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or…

> the lower class suffers by far the most This is a tautology. The lower class is defined that way. If they didn't suffer the most, they wouldn't be lower class.

Your comment is saying "suffer(poor) > suffer(rich)" is true by definition.

But the article is saying "d suffer(poor) / d(inflation) > d suffer(rich) / d(inflation)", the truth of which is not immediately obvious.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#417

Post by t43562 »

peresthe wrote: post #270

It is truly strange to see so many comments on Hacker News -- a message board owned by YCombinator, a startup accelerator whose actual mission is to launch wildly profitable companies -- talking conspiratorially about the wealthy being "parasites", lambasting "capitalism", pointing to increased profits as evidence of unscrupulous behavior.

The class struggle is the favorite argument for every form of ill in the UK. It's a culture war if you like. Once someone gets to the point of blaming something on the evil rich or the feckless layabouts then you cannot get any further in working out what's actually going wrong.

It is a horrendously boring argument which immigrants like me "cannot understand" because somehow or other we don't feel like we belong on either "side".

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#418

Post by alerter »

I'm living in the UK (Edinburgh) and I definitely feel like everything has gotten worse. The facts - on waiting times, strike days, inflation, wage stagnation, inequality etc. - speak for themselves. But there is also just a general feeling of malaise and decay.

I will say that the large population of increasingly Facebook-addled Boomers really don't help. These are people who've paid off their mortgage, can collect rental income, are becoming pensioners, and generally vote against immigration, against public spending, and for lower tax rates. They're also massive consumers of NHS resources. We're going to be supporting these people with our taxes for decades to come. Meanwhile the Government has consistently failed to support productivity growth or infrastructure investment, and our whole economy is oriented around the service sector in London and a handful of other cities.

The only alternative prospectus (Corbyn's "Green New Deal") was trashed by the established media, and his successor is now delivering bromides about national unity and being "tough on crime". He's also put EU integration completely off the menu. Nobody in power seems to grasp the scale of the economic and demographic crisis we're facing. It's not great.

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#419

Post by mhardcastle »

boc wrote: post #35

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.

Animal feed makes demand for food highly elastic. Simplest example, you can convert #2 corn to cow feed and make 1 calorie out of 7, turn it into chicken feed for closer to 1:2, or turn it into corn-based food directly. People can and do shift consumption to cheaper substitutes, like chicken instead of beef (or oatmeal instead of eggs for breakfast).

Re: UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

#420

Post by justsocrateasin »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #359
simonh wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope you don't mind me re-posting this from another comment of mine, but since you specifically raise the UK it's actually more relevant here. In the UK it doesn't look like gouging is the issue: https://www.grocerygazette.co.uk/2023/01/31/food-companies-p... Honestly you're right that inflation can benefit the well off, but I don't buy the conspiracy theory angle. "The Establishment" has been holding inflation rates…

Why doesn’t 4% count as weaponized? That’s higher than typical annual raises, not to mention non workers

IIRC deflation and inflation are equally as bad. If 'inflation' rates are negative, the economy grinds to a halt. Having an inflation rate of ~2% is widely considered to be beneficially for everyone, since it's in a 'goldilocks' zone, it creates stability.

Inflation of 4% sure isn't as good as 2%, but generally speaking the inflation rate in the UK appears to hover around 2-3% during "stable" periods. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/inf...

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