I mean, that’s 4 years of our lives taken! 4 years of opportunities that were more challenging because they wanted a number on a computer to go up! 4 years of feeling worse than necessary about my finances and management of them and general personhood because i felt like i couldn’t afford anything because everything was priced egregiously!
And now they’re saying ‘oh well we fixed it now’. Fuck you!!! Get over yourselves! Holy shit, I can’t wait to happily be friends with the giant corporations again!! Just the arrogance that we’re happy to once again be at their beck and call because they changed the numbers they could’ve always changed. Sickening.
And I feel like I have a brain disease because i’ve been worrying and posting for years about how disgusting it is that they’re just cranking the numbers up to see what’ll happen and obviously no one will stop them because this is an oligarchy — and i kept getting well-ackshullyied into the ground by esteemed logical posters explaining how supply chains work. Well look at this shit you motherfuckers!
Just the amount of incredibly deep and sophisticated social engineering is so disgusting:
It’s a savvy play for shifting perceptions of value, crucial for consumers in the decision-making process of where to shop for bread and eggs. Customers benefit by saving some money; retailers possibly benefit even more by being known as the company that magnanimously trimmed prices.
Go to hell, stop shifting my value perception. I should be able to decide what I feel about milk or zucchini. When I think about a croissant I should be thinking about France, not Target pricing strategies.
Most importantly, the theater of making grand pronouncements about lower prices is great for retailers’ reputations. Forget about all the price hikes grocery retailers and food brands implemented in the last few years — now companies would like consumers to focus on the savings they’re offering. “They’re all leaning into this inflation-oriented messaging,” says Stambor, which he notes is interesting because food inflation isn’t high at the moment. It’s the accumulation of past inflation that we’re still feeling the sting of; the prices just didn’t come down.
And we’re meant to thank them for this! I hope to god they can’t put the genie back in the bottle with this. I won’t forget 2020, I’ll hate these bloodsuckers til the day I die.
Its worth recognizing that our quality of life is heavily predicated on the subsidy of cheap labor abroad. As markets move international and these historical serfs begin to move into the consumer side of the market, we’re seeing a rise in global demand. And as big businesses consolidate ownership of real estate and productive capital, we’re seeing a drop in the number of suppliers. That gives the business end of the spectrum enormous leverage. But its only one side of the equation.
This isn’t strictly a problem of profits. Big western states like the US and Canada produce enormous amounts of domestic waste. We’ve monetized that waste, such that you can turn a profit by simply consuming large quantities of excess energy and raw materials, and translate that into paper assets that can be borrowed against in a historically low-interest lending market. But in the end, a big part of the reason everything is getting so expensive is that we’ve been eating our own seed corn.
When you pollute your groundwater with chemical waste from fossil fuels and plastics, that’s going to drive up the cost of agriculture and potable water utilities. When you burn off all the cheap fuels and refuse to invest in green/nuclear alternatives (because fossil fuels generate enormous profit margins and green/nukes don’t) then the cost of energy rises. When you build horizontally rather than vertically, refuse to invest in mass transit, and force everyone to make enormous commutes, real estate starts selling at an exceptional premium.
Yeah, there’s definitely an element of greed in the mix. But it can’t be discounted how much of our domestic wealth is squandered through mismanagement. Americans need twice the income of their German or Korean peers to live half as good, because we do everything so haphazardly.
It’s what we vote for. Everytime someone suggests European solutions they’re branded a communist and we vote in the “greed is good” guy.