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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

#911

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…

Na, that's crazy talk. Of course the government printing oodles of money has absolutely nothing to do with inflation.

oBViOUSLy tHE rUSsIANs dID it ;p

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

#912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, the problem is fairly global. So UK specific explanations are unlikely to have much validity. Some punters myopically only considering UK features (such as brexit) is misleading. https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/food-inflation (Click on World Tab, and click on the inflation heading to sort - I needed to tap and slide to get it to sort descending).

Inflation (in general, not food inflation specifically) in the UK is worse than in, say, Germany and France. The reasons for that are specific to the UK, and they do include Brexit. I think it's not myopic to point that out. We shouldn't give a free pass to people who have wreaked economic havoc to the UK just because there are some geopolitical factors that happen to wreak even worse havoc at the same time.

Absolutely not. But Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, Czechia, all have comparable or worse inflation. Brexit was and continues to be a shit show, but the UK isn't uniquely in trouble here.

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

#913

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that is OK, as long as you recognize your position of extreme privilege there.

I don’t think it’s “extreme privilege” to not notice a price increase of maybe $3? I could see it if you’re living in extreme poverty but anyone middle class and above shouldn’t waste mental energy on things like that

It's certainly not limited to extreme poverty. I'd say the clear majority will show concern when a grocery item climbs $3.

While I wouldn't accuse you of showing "extreme privilege" for not noticing a $3 price increase... good on you for not needing to worry about that... I'm tempted to accuse you of it for thinking it's only the poor that would. That's a pretty glaring disconnect.

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

#914
post #859
post #856

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the actual dark pattern in pricing is when prices remain fixed but quantity/volume really reduces. It's subtle on the aisle, but if you use online shopping it's blatant when the product you usually order is no longer available and it suggests an item that is identical in terms of the product it is and price, but has a glaring reduction in weight.

aka. "shrinkflation": Same price, less product.

Sort of. My Noosa is still 8oz but it is thinner. Now that's some bean countin' bullshit.

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

#915

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…

> 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. I took up cooking from scratch as a hobby a couple of decades ago. I highly recommend it. After a bit of a learning curve, it's cheaper, tastier. and better for you than highly processed foodlike substances.

I have learnt to unpack a few things here.

Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper.

But food is also a class issue. Those with time to spare (ie rich) can indulge in for example "stuffing a mushroom" - Shirley Conran famously recanted twenty years of writing cookery lifestyle books exhorting women to become corden bleu cooks by saying life was to short to stuff a mushroom - and that is kind of my point.

I mean Gordon bloody Ramsey does not prepare food the way he tells you to in his cookbooks - it's too slow and inefficient.

All the recipies I love to cook - getting the temperature of the linguini just right before pouring over eggs and pecorino for carbonara for instance - is frankly, a nightmare nutrition wise (even if it's a hit kid wise) and a plate of chicken breast and five different veg and fruit for after is waaaay better - but how many recipients books will do that, how many blog posts extoll boiled peas.

Maybe we would learn from the staff of life - Bread. In the first weeks of lockdown, flour vanished from shelves - obviously because of a shortage but mostly because flour was diverted from domestic use to go to actual bakers and factories who could efficiently mass produce the staple of life that was then shipped to our supermarket shelves to eat. Yes there were bakers running triple shifts, logistic planners sleeping in the office and HVV drivers going every which way. But in the end feeding millions is like Gorden Ramsey says - if you do it like the instagram post says, you are doing it wrong

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

#916
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If wholesale food costs have gone up and they're simply passing that on then they may not be making any more money. Here's wholesale food prices in the US: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU578101 In fact you'd expect reduced sales from the higher prices to put pressure on profits. That is what seems to be happening in the UK: https://www.grocerygazette.co.uk/2023/01/31/food-companies-p... But not in the US, wher…

All well and good except for the fact that these companies have gone on the record in their earning calls to say this is just them squeezing the end consumer as much as they can. But go ahead and makeup some false justification to defend them against the truth of their own words.

Dude, did you even read my post? Yes that is happening in the US, I said as much. In the UK, profits are down. For the most part in both cases, I'm sure there are exceptions.

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

#917
post #348
post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top level comment was about the UK, and over here property prices are down. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/mar/05/house-... .

Nope. They went up this month. "UK house prices defy gloom with an average £3,000 rise" 20/03/2023 https://www.theguardian.com/money/2023/mar/20/uk-house-price...

So they went down by £14,000 and then went up £3,000. So are still down.

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

#918

I believe that we can make a small dent on this problem if we improve the technology that runs greenhouses. (My bias: I work for a startup that is working on this and I'm kind of obsessed with the industry.) Here is what current greenhouse tech looks like: a human (called a grower) uses their intuition to adjust hundreds of settings that parameterise what the actuators should do in different circumstances. For exampl…

how much of the total cost of a tomato actually goes to the farmer? less than 10% wouldn’t surprise me

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

#919
post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

aka. "shrinkflation": Same price, less product.

Sort of. My Noosa is still 8oz but it is thinner. Now that's some bean countin' bullshit.

That stuff is so good, best yogurt ever

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

#920
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't quote it to contradict the situation.

The way you phrased it made it seem that way. Starting with "Meanwhile" is a common way of introducing a contradictory scenario.

Can I just point out that my comment wasn't an outright contradiction either, people just assumed it must have been one (correctly, in this case) since it would have been a rather pointless observation otherwise.
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