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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

#231

Post by benjaminwootton »

jupp0r wrote: post #219
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…

Tragically (and perhaps comically) it's the blue collar class that is the cause of all of this by voting for Brexit.

Definitely Brexit and not the half a £trillion we printed to fund Covid handouts.

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

#232

Post by makomk »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #212
martinald wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assets are deflating at the moment though. S&P500 is down, property prices are down, etc. Asset prices are highly inversely correlated to interest rates, so for a 'rich' person you are actually much better off without inflation, as interest rates are lower and asset prices rise faster.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. Stock prices are on the slide and property prices and rental yields are extremely precarious. I also agree that low rates were good as you could invest in property with leverage and in businesses which could borrow and raise money to cheaply to grow. Nobody is having a good time right now.

Because the British media feeds this narrative by making it look like the rich always win. The only changes in their wealth that the media draws attention to are increases, and if there's a drop that just gives a new baseline for the next round of headlines about increases. High inflation and increased interest rates got assets down across the board? Well, that means that the better off are getting lots of "unearned income" from interest whilst normal people's wages decline in real terms, never mind that the value of whatever savings they're earning that interest on is also dropping in real terms by more than they're making back in interest.

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

#233

Post by unmole »

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.

> raising prices as high as possible

Why did companies wait until this year to do that?

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

#234

Post by Veen »

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…

> 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.

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

#235

Post by pjc50 »

pc_edwin wrote: post #153

It's perplexing how some are quick to place all blame on "greedy price gouging capitalists" while you have a massive elephant in the room. As a society, we pride ourselves on being logical yet we ignore the predictable consequences of injecting trillions into the economy amidst heavily damaged supply chains? I'm not even referring to the downstream consequences such as the extreme fragility leading to blow ups like S…

Conventional economic policy lets you balance inflation with both monetary and fiscal policy. But there's no will to tax the money out of the economy again. The money printing delayed a lot of economic collapse that would otherwise have happened during the pandemic.

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

#236

Post by ROTMetro »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #212
martinald wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assets are deflating at the moment though. S&P500 is down, property prices are down, etc. Asset prices are highly inversely correlated to interest rates, so for a 'rich' person you are actually much better off without inflation, as interest rates are lower and asset prices rise faster.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. Stock prices are on the slide and property prices and rental yields are extremely precarious. I also agree that low rates were good as you could invest in property with leverage and in businesses which could borrow and raise money to cheaply to grow. Nobody is having a good time right now.

Because only one class will come out of this with MORE assets that at some point will return back to their higher valuable. It's a completely facetious argument. Sure you lost your house, but think of how much the poor billionaire's paper value dropped (while the billionaires asset acquisition continued apace taking advantage of the firesale forced upon the lower classes).

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

#237

Post by RC_ITR »

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…

It’s hard to grok but inflation is just the “price of money” in terms of goods and services. (I.e. I can ‘buy’ one pound with X good)

Inflation only negatively affects the poor in that their wages are sticky and do not adjust in time (so in effect, their wages in goods and services terms declines)

The same thing happens to rich people, it’s actually a “capital owner vs salary man” divide. (A small building owner is impacted less than a very wealthy athlete for example, since one can raise rent yearly and the other is in a long term salary contract).

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

#238

Post by apetresc »

bialpio wrote: post #188
yourusername wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unilever's net profit over 2022 increased by 24.9%

It's probably better to look at the margin, I could see how the profits increased in absolute numbers as people may have switched from eating out to home-cooked food.

Do restaurants get their groceries from completely different supply chains than the rest of us?

Sure, the distributors are different, but I'd assume it's all still Monsanto, Unilever, etc., at the end of the day anyway.

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

#239

Post by elevenoh4 »

tacker2000 wrote: post #204
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…

You are talking like inflation is some conspiracy wielded by “the rich” (who are they? Are they all friends with each other and plan all their schemes together?) against the “others”. Fact is the inflation we are seeing here is caused by the after effects of Covid, the Energy price surges caused by the Ukraine war and in the special case of UK - Brexit, which has lead to huge import shortages due to increased bureauc…

https://cloudfront-us-east-2.images.arcpublishing.com/reuter...

You do not get it.

This inflation is due to insiders (central bankers) printing money. Covid & ukraine are convenient excuses. Look up where this money ended up.

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

#240

Post by themaninthedark »

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.

We had shortages of ammonia, a key component of fertilizer, last year. That drove up fertilizer costs. Not a huge surprise when the output goods are then marked up.
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