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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

#961

Post by sincarne »

wahern wrote: post #933
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper. > But food is also a class issue. If we put these two beliefs together (and I think we're of similar minds), I think we should amend the first to be "meal planning and preparation is a life skill". Unfortunately the cooking craze over the past few decades has done nothing to improve, let alone restore, that life skill. > I mean Gordon bl…

I bought a couple of the Budget Bytes (https://shop.budgetbytes.com) meal plans a while back. They're not fantastic if you're outside of North America, but I was able to make them work. Haute cuisine it ain't, but if you're looking for a starting point I recommend them.

I also recommend starting to put your favourite recipes into a recipe app (I use Paprika, available on most platforms). Even add simple stuff like Yogurt and Fruit Breakfast. Then you can use the app's built-in meal planner and grocery list generator.

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

#962

Post by mharig »

hef19898 wrote: post #207
Tenoke wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better comparison would be other EU countries and I'm seeing food inflation estimates for ~22% in Germany at the top of Google. 0. https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/food-inflation#:~:text=... . 1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/germany-inflation...

Last year we spent two weeks in Iceland. I do remember, 10+ years ago, paying the same for 2 (two!) onions as you did for 1kg in Germany over there. Last year, we were not shocked at all, actually we paid less then we did in Germany, not much but still. Turned out Icelands grocery prices were roughly on par with France, and a tad lower than Germany at the time. So, German groccery prices did a lot of catching up sinc…

Just two small corrections:

neither Covid19 nor the war caused the effects, it were the measures that the stupid monkey horde took.

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

#963

Post by SkipperCat »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #463
SkipperCat wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The war in 100% the result of Putin. Putting the responsibility of this on Biden doesn't make sense. Besides, Russia was sending troops into eastern Ukraine since 2014, way before Biden took office.

You showed the evidence in your own post. The return to Biden brought the return of typical American foreign policy, which Trump upset. This foreign policy plan has basically been the same under Bush, Obama, and Biden. The last time Putin pushed the Ukraine issue was under Obama. Under Trump’s watch, Putin didn't dare touch Ukraine. If I was Putin, and I wanted to invade a country, I would sure as hell prefer Biden a…

You are correct in your statement "If I was Putin, and I wanted to invade a country". Putin wanted to invade. Its his war, nobody else's.

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

#964

Post by antisthenes »

rpmason wrote: post #691

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…

Here's the thing:

Plants don't really give a shit. Implementing a convoluted tech solution in greenhouses for an additional 5% efficiency will never pay back for itself.

> (My bias: I work for a startup that is working on this and I'm kind of obsessed with the industry.)

I suggest you actually learn more about growing plants than optimizing 20 different atmospheric and HVAC parameters. Many of these recent startups folded because they couldn't figure out that growing lettuce indoors hydroponically doesn't actually make anyone any money.

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

#965

Post by somenameforme »

cheriot wrote: post #736
somenameforme wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main driver in inflation is monetary velocity - the rate at which money is exchanging hands in the market. Increases in monetary supply almost invariably lead to increases in monetary velocity, so the two are generally equated - but this is not strictly necessary. If I gave you a quadrillion dollars tomorrow, and you chose to simply keep it under your [rather large] bed, but otherwise continued living as you do -…

So tax $1.10 for every $1 redistributed. It's a choice to frame inflation as coming from redistribution vs the wealthy avoiding taxes.

Again this is not really a solution to the problem. Because the issue is not one of monetary supply, but of velocity. Giving money to people who will spend that money increases monetary velocity. The only way to prevent this is to reduce the amount of money people are spending.

That's why, for instance, the Fed is currently raising interest rates. They want to 'gently' brake the economy (while trying to avoid breaking it) such that people stop spending so much money, and inflation cools down. By contrast countless countries have tried to solve inflation by simply naively tackling the problem.

People don't have enough money to buy chicken? Well obviously we just need to give them more money! And that's how you get Zimbabwe. [1] Alternatively, another direct approach is to say "Okay - companies may no longer charge more than $0.50 for a chicken." That's how you get Venezuela. [2]

[1] - https://www.theguardian.com/money/2016/may/14/zimbabwe-trill...

[2] - https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/venezuelas-empty-shelve...

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

#966

Post by bumby »

staunton wrote: post #898
Nifty3929 wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Surely if you can get away with price gouging, then you would want to price gouge on more stuff, right? Of course, there are diminishing returns here, because as you produce more stuff, you might be able to gouge less and less. But certainly there must be some max-profit equilibrium higher than the current price, if you are already able to gouge. Price gouging usually leads to producing more stuff, if it goe…

In many countries there is a tendency in healthcare to perform a lot of medically unnecessary or even harmful surgeries (back, hips,...) to make a larger profit. The optimal treatment would be cheaper and less profitable, so it is not chosen.

I think there are other factors that contribute to the uniqueness of healthcare. In the US, for example, it seems to be the one area where you aren't told the price before receiving the product/service. This obviously makes it easier to jack up the prices. Also, the urgent need often makes people insensitive to the price even if they knew it.

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

#967

Post by bumby »

taurath wrote: post #874
Nifty3929 wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? Surely if you can get away with price gouging, then you would want to price gouge on more stuff, right? Of course, there are diminishing returns here, because as you produce more stuff, you might be able to gouge less and less. But certainly there must be some max-profit equilibrium higher than the current price, if you are already able to gouge. Price gouging usually leads to producing more stuff, if it goe…

Supermarkets in my area have a near monopoly and don’t meaningfully compete anymore - they can charge whatever people will pay. It’s all owned by Kroger and the nearest non Kroger supermarket is a dozen miles away.

Grocery chains are notoriously low-margin businesses though. Maybe a few places are able to gouge, but as a whole, they cannot and still be low-margin as an industry.

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

#968

Post by bumby »

andromeduck wrote: post #959
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes yes fellow consumers. We should remove consumer protections and lower corporation taxes! Then I’m sure the companies will treat us better!

Let's tax our way out of a famine.

This constant dichotomy in rhetoric is toxic to finding solutions. Surely, it's not an "either/or" scenario.

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

#969

Post by bumby »

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.

We have to be careful about how we define our utility function. I'd argue that it's not as simple as just "producing more stuff" but rather being able to focus on producing "more of the right stuff." All production increase is not the same, unless your goal is just "more GDP." Rather, I think what a lot of this discussion alludes to is that more blind production does not necessarily lead to better quality of life (what we really care about in general).

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

#970

Post by andy_ppp »

andromeduck wrote: post #959
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes yes fellow consumers. We should remove consumer protections and lower corporation taxes! Then I’m sure the companies will treat us better!

Let's tax our way out of a famine.

You’re an idiot, we should tax the wealthy, take half the money of people with £1bn+ (including the King) and pay off the national debt or force them to invest it in small businesses.

We should not equate rent seeking and genuine innovation as the same things.

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