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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

#521

Post by tapland »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #464
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. Uh, that's not true in the slightest? Are you completely unaware of what's happened in the stock market and real estate market over the past year (these are the examples you provided lol)?

Do you think that won’t recover? Anyone with means can buy up now or keep saving. The poor can’t and their 0 investments will be worth 0 after as well.

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

#522

Post by dehrmann »

Nifty3929 wrote: post #465
andy_ppp wrote: post #137

I cannot believe supermarkets these days, it is insane the increases in prices, I’ve seen £5 for a tube of normal toothpaste and £6 for a tiny Pizza that is sometimes available for £3. How people on modest salaries survive I don’t know. Quite often I’m starting to notice dark patterns in pricing where things you normally didn’t worry about will have randomly increased by £2-3 and you get the checkout and you’ve spent…

The fix is to produce more stuff. It's that simple. It might not be easy though. It would require us to focus on production, remove barriers, streamline regulations, encourage and actively celebrate production. It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases. So we have less stuff. Combine this with giving people more money and you get inflation.

So much of what supermarkets sell is commoditized that this doesn't work. Toothpaste is in a very different place than EVs.

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

#523

Post by [deleted] »

cool_dude85 wrote: post #497
Nifty3929 wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lower class does suffer the most, but unfortunately it is the policies intended to help them which actually cause most of the problem. By giving money to people without producing more stuff - or even making it harder to produce the same - you MUST have inflation, rationing, or empty shelves - and often all three. The solution to allowing lower classes to have more stuff is to make it easier for everybody to produ…

>By giving money to people without producing more stuff - or even making it harder to produce the same - you MUST have inflation, rationing, or empty shelves - and often all three. Says who? Why can't the people producing stuff simply take lower profit margins instead?

[deleted]

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

#524

Post by galangalalgol »

comte7092 wrote: post #472
Jimmc414 wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's (inflation) been the number 1 priority for central banks since the early 90s. I might believe this if M2 hadn't increased 4x since 2000 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL

The money supply gets brought up in every single discussion around inflation on this forum, and it’s obviously relevant. However inflation!= growth in the money supply. A lot of the reasoning behind that growth was because inflation was persistently below the 2% target for the entire period up until 2021. That’s two decades of stubbornly low inflation, despite the feds best efforts in juicing the money supply. It’s m…

The GP specifically mentioned bread prices too, and for that surely supply due to the war is also a factor. Food supply limitations, shipping being threatened near Iran, trading partners being asked to pick sides. This is all very similar to the picture Zeihan depicts in his stuff. Unnerving.

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

#525

Post by ghusto »

kaanski wrote: post #198
_Wintermute wrote: post #87

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

In general there seems to be a weird zeitgeist of negative exceptionalism in the UK at the moment. Not sure why but generally journos seem to write about issues like they are only hitting the UK when a simple google search shows they aren’t. It does come across like a weird concerted effort to paint the UK as collapsing since leaving the EU. The majority of journos seem to be able to write only negatively about UK cu…

> Not sure why ...

Are you being facetious ;)

It's because there are narratives to follow, sides to pick. There's no room for facts by themselves, they have to fit some story your pack has bought into.

Right, left, middle, or anarchy, it's all the same; you're part of a herd.

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

#526

Post by Drakim »

bluGill wrote: post #515
cool_dude85 wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>By giving money to people without producing more stuff - or even making it harder to produce the same - you MUST have inflation, rationing, or empty shelves - and often all three. Says who? Why can't the people producing stuff simply take lower profit margins instead?

That is the lower class producing stuff who you are asking to take lower profit margins.

There is a very strong disconnect between the value created by the lower class though their labor and what they are paid in wages.

Companies don't use some formula where they give a percentage of what you create to you in return, they try to squeeze your wages down as low as possible. It doesn't matter if you produce 5000 bucks an hour or 100 bucks an hour in value for your company, they still want to pay you as little as possible.

Stuff like staff loyalty and retention has been to a large part abandoned in favor of simply keeping wages down.

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

#527

Post by century19 »

hnburnsy wrote: post #496

Anyone who watched Clarkson's Farms would get the impression that overburdensome government regulations on farming have contributed tremendously to increase food costs in the UK. Clarkson himself during the series mentions that Brexit has had an impact too.

(Serious) Food inflation started within the last 2 years. Has there been increased regulation in that time?

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

#528

Post by pydry »

prox wrote: post #516
louwrentius wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why so convoluted. Just tax the rich (companies) properly. The resources and money is available. The current government chooses not to allocate it properly. What is happening in the UK is to me 100% the result of the current Conservative Party and their policies.

Tax the rich and they go somewhere else (see recent discussions about the wealth tax in France)

The wealthy in the UK are largely landed gentry. They can't flee with their property and if they sell it off at firesale prices to ordinary folk to avoid being taxed that would largely solve the housing crisis.

The problem wouldn't be that they would leave. The problem would be that they would stay and become violent.

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

#529

Post by samstave »

Inflation is super high in California, but I track it mentally on a per product basis for things I buy regularly. Juice is up 33% - lots of things are 18%, 25%, etc.

I dont care what they state national inflation is - Its important by food category.

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

#530

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]
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