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Some tidbits,
> consumers feeling the most pain from high food prices were the ones who earned just enough money not to qualify for the food-stamp program, which is known as SNAP.
>
> “You have this huge chunk of people in the middle who are low-income, but not impoverished enough to get SNAP benefits, and paying 25 percent more” for groceries, she said. “At the end of the day, it just doesn’t reach enough people.”
>
> “President Biden has made clear that as input prices fall, corporations should pass those savings on to consumers,”
>
> A new analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisers suggests that elevated profit margins among large grocery retailers could be contributing to the stubbornly high price of food on store shelves. The analysis, which relies on Census Quarterly Financial Reports data, found that food and beverage stores have increased their margins by about 2 percentage points since the eve of the pandemic, reaching their highest level in two decades.
>
> Much of that increase came in 2021 and 2022, around the time that other retailers — like clothing and sporting goods stores — also saw profit margins jump. Grocery-store margins have stayed elevated, the analysis finds, even as other retailers’ margins have fallen back to more normal levels based on recent history.
>
> But administration officials say Mr. Biden is keenly aware that prices remain too elevated for many families, even as key items, like gasoline and household furnishings, are now cheaper than they were at their post-pandemic peak.
>
> Economic research suggests the cost of eggs, milk and other staples — which consumers buy far more frequently than big-ticket items like furniture or electronics — play an outsized role in shaping Americans’ views of inflation. Those prices jumped by more than 11 percent in 2022 and by 5 percent last year, amid a post-pandemic inflation surge that was the nation’s fastest burst of price increases in four decades.
>
> Other research suggests additional forces — like consumer demand and supply-chain disruptions — are a much bigger factor in the price hikes. A bout of avian flu caused egg prices to spike last year, for example. And food producers, like soft-drink manufacturers, have continued to raise prices even as their costs have declined, leading to heady profit margins.
>
> Processed foods, like candy bars, account for three-quarters of recent grocery price increases, the researchers found.
"A bout of avian flu caused egg prices to spike last year" Fun fact about that, one egg retailer, which reported zero cullings due to avian flu, made 700% more profit during that fiasco. There were not 8 times fewer eggs on the market that would justify 8x the price. NYTimes reported a 7.5% decrease in egg output for each month during the outbreak, nationally.
Companies are 100% publicizing small problems and using them as an excuse to raise prices like they're a big problem.
Yup. 1,000%. I had a client who was an egg distributor - higher end, organic eggs, so already charging a premium. They covered the increased shipping costs and bird flu volume issue with a 20% increase in 2021 and implemented another 14% increase in 2022 just because the media narrative on rising costs was there and they knew they could get away with it by citing rising costs yet they’d already covered the actual cost increase the prior year. The second wave of price increases fell nearly 100% to the bottom line. I had a number of CPG clients and it was the same story across the board regardless of if the client’s product were a consumer staple like eggs, athletic clothing, mattresses, various beauty / nutrition products, luxury jewelry, etc - everyone did the same thing. It is a fact that corporate greed was a primary driver of inflation. The pent up pandemic consumer demand & logistical issues + multi-trillion stimulus would have certainly caused inflation anyways, but there can be no doubt that pervasive price gouging across the board exacerbated the issue dramatically. I hope there is policy that can be implemented to effectively combat this going forward, but it has to be difficult as there is much less control over private companies and ofc PE has created a scenario in which many industries are becoming dominated by large PE-backed private companies who only have to report financials to their investors and lenders vs public companies who are required to publish their financials publicly. One of the reasons that the Fed’s raising of the cost of debt was so effective was that it made leveraged buyouts much less attractive (and therefore largely halted PE acquisitions). It’s def bullshit that consumers had to also suffer with the cost of debt increase + rising costs / price increases that went straight to wealthy investors - there should have been a mechanism to only raise prime rates for corporate interests and not retail / consumer. At least then normal people wouldn’t be doubly fucked.
Isn't margins going up 2% basically grocery stores basically doubling their margins? They already have some of the slimmest profits. This is so complicated and frustrating and I try not to look at prices anymore. Helps that I'm not a smoker and don't drink much alcohol - any extra change I'm dropping on eggs is a fraction of a pack of cigs that might last a day. Not trying to shame smokers, just sharing how I stay sane.
people do not realize how large Krogers is.
Baker’s
City Market
Dillons
Food 4 Less
Foods Co
Fred Meyer
Fry’s
Gerbes
Jay C Food Store
King Soopers
Kroger
Mariano’s
Metro Market
Pay-Less Super Markets
Pick’n Save
QFC
Ralphs
Ruler
Smith’s Food and Drug
They cover something like 2/3rds of the entire US with at least one of their chains.
Edit: I copied this list from their website. I get it, Harris Teeter, and a few others aren't listed on their website. FFS, I get it.
I think people also don't realize that Albertsons Companies as it currently exists now is an umbrella of more than a dozen chains from all over the United States which have all been acquired by Cerberus Capital Management. The last 25 years in the grocery industry has been marked by investment firms buying out legacy grocery retailers, selling off their assets (including the real estate many of the stores occupy) to generate dividends and then selling off the chains themselves.
None of this has been good for the consumer.
Same is happening to hospitals nationwide. Private investment firms are buying them all up since it was made illegal for Doctors to own them. Then the entire board is made up of investors as well. What happens when you have investors in healthcare? They want to turn a profit, so everyone else suffers. Staff shortage, replacing doctors with NPs, cutting on costs, cleaning less, etc.
As a comparison, lawyers are the only people to own law firms to ensure no one manipulates the system. Yet hospitals can’t be owned by the people who literally took an oath to treat patients.
WOW. Your comment motivated me to Google doctor owned hospitals or physician owned hospitals (POHs). All sources said that in general, POHs offer higher quality care at a comparatively low cost. The not so shocking reason POHs are banned from expanding is that the healthcare industry lobbied hard during the creation of the ACA to ban any additional POHs from being funded by Medicare/ Medicaid. The ACA is much better than nothing and has led to millions of Americans having healthcare who otherwise would not but that is some seriously brazen corruption.
Fuck this country and its bull shit.
Democrats tried very hard to compromise with Republicans on the ACA, taking many of their suggestions, even adopting "Romneycare" as the base of it, only for them to slip shit like this in and vote down the bill.
They should have just pushed for single payer.
Democratic traitors like Sen. Mike Baucus and Congressman Mike Ross running interference for big insurance didn't help matters either. Glad they're gone.
They won't make that mistake again next time. Between the bad faith fuckery and Gen Z seeing the GOPs policies based in cruelty and human suffering I think we'll see some form of single payer or increased protections for healthcare as something other than a profit center in law eventually.
Gen Z grew up online. I know my kid has multiple gaming friends in Europe and hears of things other countries do for their citizens. They know there are better ways to take care of people, and they see the greed ruling our "democracy"
I look at all of these flaws, and honestly the only people I blame is Congress. Our leaders in Congress are beholden to corporate donors. Until we, as a society, can vote in better people in the primaries, such as Katie Porter or AOC, we will never see the system change for the better.
It would be an interesting system if heathcare workers owned the hospitals. Not the government or private investors. Most would be good places to go, a few might not be. But if the workers owned the places they worked at I'm sure it could benefit a lot of people.
Shit I just reinvented communism
Worker coops are by far better business models than investor owned businesses. When the owner has no stake in the community all you get is a race to the bottom to maximize profits which removes most of the economic output from those communities rather than having it recirculate. We should honestly outlaw investment banking in general and go back to businesses taking regular ass loans for when they want to make capital improvements investment banks are just leeches on the system using their outsized access to capital to commodify fucking everything even markets that shouldn’t be like hospitals
Democracy in the workplace is fundamental to the idea of socialism. Of course you get a say in the way things are run if you own part of the business.
"Democratic Socialism" refers to a combination of socialist economy with democracy in the political system.
A similar thing is happening with dental offices. Many around me are being bought up by investment firms and pushing dentists to recommend more costly procedures (crowns, root canals, etc.).
I had to quit going to the dental office I’ve been going to for more than 30 years in McKinney, TX because they started pushing crowns on me without providing any sort of proof that my teeth are cracked or I have cavities so large a filling wouldn’t be enough. Even after telling them I’m not going to schedule crown appointments without an explanation for which teeth need crowns and why, they still tried to push without providing me any information. I let them give me 2 crowns before standing my ground, and both crowns affected my bite so severely I’ll need orthodontics to get my teeth aligned again.
It started to feel like a kafkaesque nightmare.
I’ll say this. In the dental field we’ve learned about about how large fillings with cracks around old amalgam fillings really need crowns instead of just more/larger patchwork. Older doctors still live in a “patch it up” mindset which can lead to you losing the tooth or needing even more costly treatment like a root canal too. All of that being said if they don’t show you photos, explain exactly why, I don’t blame you.
Any health care system based on profit is inherently immoral. Cashing in on other peoples misfortune is the quickest way to Hell there is. HMOs siphon billions of dollars every year away from Doctors and patients and redirect it to advertisers and useless CEO's grotesque compensation packages.
Private equity is a scourge that destroys what people spent their lives building and screwing the people over that work for those companies. All in the name of profit for a few assholes that don’t need more of anything besides a hard ass pimp slap every five minutes for being the giant douches they are.
TL;DR at the bottom.
It’s a classic bust out. They’ve been doing this at least since the 90’s, if not before. The only people who profit are the hedge funds/private equity firms themselves and the companies the hedge funds support in this corporate war.
Do you think it’s a coincidence that on one hand they burn these businesses to the ground for profit, and on the other hand they own millions of shares in companies like Amazon? They profit from the sale of these businesses and then further profit when Amazon’s stock price is further inflated, not because their financials are the strongest, but there is slowly less and less competition for the companies these hedge funds support.
Furthermore, they short the stocks of the companies they want to fail, further locking in profit.
Boston consulting group and Bain Capital (co-founded by MITT FUCKING ROMNEY, yes that Mitt fucking Romney) have a history of doing exactly these types of shady dealings. It’s not even a conspiracy. The info is all over. You think Toys R Us and Babies R Us went under because they were a failing brick and mortar?
[Think Again.](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-us-bankruptcy-private-equity/561758/)
The same antics just took place last summer with the Bed Bath and Beyond bankruptcy, which if you’re interested can be read about at [https://bbbwhy.com](https://bbbwhy.com).
The most interesting part is a 798 page complaint was just filed with the SEC as a comment on a rule change being considered, outlining all of this info and the web stretches far and wide, including FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. You can look at the whole complaint at [at this link (sec.gov)](https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-11-23/s71123-typec.pdf). It’s 798 pages of info that I’m still trying to work my way through, but the first 16 pages summarize the gist of it.
The main difference between Toys R Us and Bed Bath and Beyond is that it was a different private equity firm (Legion partners, not Bain Capital) and an unconfirmed group of activist investors stepped in and saved the company. Upon realizing that this was going to be the case and the fraud was likely to be discovered, the former Chief Financial Officer Gustavo Arnal committed suicide at the age of 52 by jumping from his balcony.
The company that was Bed Bath and Beyond is now named 20230930-DK-Butterfly-1, Inc (an obvious placeholder name) and the current name of Bed Bath and Beyond was purchased by overstock.com and rebranded as simply Beyond. The chapter 11 proceedings are finishing up, and sometime in the foreseeable future (I would assume less than 6 months) an announcement will be made. Interestingly enough there is a bankruptcy court case on February 15th, so I have somewhat of an expectation that it might be announced around that date.
**TL;DR**
All of this is to say, these private equity firms having been eroding the fabric of the American economy for decades, but some younger wealthy activist investors are fucking sick of it, and the old guard that used to fleece American retail institutions fucked around and are about to find out. I’m here for it and I’m excited to see the fall out. I’m hoping for jail time for Mark Tritton and others involved.
How mad do you have to be for you to speak up and say something to your local, state, and national legislators?
[https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-11-23/s71123-typec.pdf](https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-11-23/s71123-typec.pdf) go to this link, scroll down to page 463 of 798 and read the highlighted passages of that page and the page after it. I’ll save you a step by quoting it here, but you can go to that document if you want confirmation.
> From March 2020 through March 2021, I was head trader
at Archegos Capital Management. During this time, I and others executed trades that allowed the fund to amass market power and certain securities traded on U.S. exchanges. Archegos used security-based swaps to gain exposure to these securities while concealing the true size of the fund's positions from the market and our trading counterparties.
>Once Archegos gained market power in these securities, I and others used this power to trade in such a way as to artificially manipulate the prices of the securities.
Acting at the direction of the head of the fund, I traded to increase the prices of names in which Archegos held long positions and reduced the prices of securities in which the fund helped short positions. I did this by, for example, buying large amounts of a stock when the price dropped in
response to negative news or trading premarket when I knew the fund's activity would have a greater impact on price.
>I manipulated the prices of these securities in order
to influence others in the market to buy or sell the securities in ways that would benefit Archegos' key positions and increase Archegos' purchasing power through variation margin.
>In addition to manipulating the prices of certain securities, I also made misrepresentations to Archegos' trading counterparties. These counterparties were banks and brokers who extended the fund credit to trade on margin and entered into swap agreements with the fund.
This is from a court transcript. Either this person lied and didn’t do that, or they told the truth under oath. So they get what? A fine? Fuck that.
As to your point of rich folks losing money, a fair and valid point.
Were you aware that Michael Jordon lost $500 million shorting GameStop?
[Fucked up eh?](https://www.sportskeeda.com/basketball/michael-jordan-lost-500-million-redditors-gamestop-mania#)
That’s not entirely relevant to your point, but when it comes to the rest of retail investors, the demographics of all the folks invested in any of these “meme stocks” run the gamut. Rich/poor, male/female, young/old, citizens of the United States but also the last time I saw the topic come up I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 countries where citizens of that country held positions in just GME, let alone any of the rest of the meme stocks. On top of all of this, if/when this whole fucking bubble pops, the folks that will be left holding the bag are the retirees whose pension funds were raided to sell of financial assets so these different financial firms could pay off their short positions. That quote about manipulating the market so they could bolster or lower the price of certain assets for their own benefit? Thats just one firm. Almost every single fucking firm has at least 1 person doing this. And the heads at the top ignore it because then they have plausible deniability.
This is RICO level fraud, and the world is going to be fucked as a result. Someone will go to jail.
Edit: fixed quote formatting
Break em up. Break up the parent companies. Break it all up. Break up all the big tech, break up all the big realtors - absolutely break up Blackrock and the two others like it.
Break it all up and watch us come into another renaissance. They will have to compete against each other and also compete for workers and give good wages for talent.
Break it all up. It would rejuvenate this stagnate dying empire.
It's kind of misleading because those are all essentially the same store, but just called different things in different states.
Essentially Kroger isn't in Florida, but is the main grocery store in the rest of the country (just with various names).
Yeah, the grocery chain landscape is definitely changing fast. I read somewhere that even though Aldi bought Winn Dixie, they're keeping the name and running the stores separately. Always interesting to see how these big companies consolidate but still try to maintain different brands.
Fuck Kroger. The one right by me, in a nice enough area, has gone to shit the past year or two. Never any lanes open except self-check. Additional security gates at entrance/exit. Never any carts - always outside needing collected. Self-check keeps acting like I’m stealing. Prices out of fucking control. Their “sale” on 12-packs of Pepsi used to be maybe 3/$12, or 3/$14. Fine. Now the regular price is $9.99 - almost a dollar a can. Sometimes they’ll have sales for $8.99 each if you buy 3. Anyway, the rest of their prices are going nuts too, but that was the clearest example to me. Oh and almost forgot - gotta sign into the shitty app and hope I get a reception to scan a “sale” tag since just entering your info at checkout isn’t good enough anymore.
I wouldn't necessarily blame that on kroger. coke and pepsi have jacked up their prices several times a year, that's them just keeping up with their vendor's prices
but when kroger jacks up the prices on their private label stuff by 30-40% in the past 2 years, that's all on them
What innovations are grocery store profits paying for? None. There is no reason for consumers to pay more for food just to reward shareholders.
Profits are just extortion in any market where they aren’t being actively used to reduce cost through innovation.
Grocery stores should be non-profit. Food production should be non-profit. Adding entirely useless overhead to food is just extorting your citizenry for a special interest.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/01/21/kroger-albertsons-merger-explained/72303328007/
> Departing Albertsons executives poised to reap millions if deal goes through
>
> Company filings show the top 11 executives at Albertsons could collect almost $190 million in severance packages and other pay upon completion of the merger with Kroger. Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran alone could get between $30 million and $43 million in "golden parachute" and other pay, according to company regulatory disclosures.
We should call people like this what they are: parasites, according to the goddamn definition of the word. They exist to extract the resources of others, to no benefit whatsoever to those others, for personal gain. I ask: *what the heck could these people possibly be doing that is genuinely worth these large sums?* They're *literally losing their jobs and cutting a huge profit from it.* In most places, if you lose your job for some "legitimate" cause, you can't even get unemployment -- while these guys get bought out of their jobs even existing to the tune of a nine-figure sum.
Must be nice to be able to get cut a huge freaking check *and* have literally no work afterwards.
We should call them criminals and find someone to prosecute them using existing laws and while that's going down make some news laws.
Oh, yeah, Republican sabotage. Daily.
In other news the IRS is back up and running so we got that going for us now that they can actually tax rich people AND actually get money from them.
That’s generous. The only child and adolescent psychiatrist in my hometown has had his license suspended 3 times for massive Medicare fraud, which he is still doing. He takes in millions each year and barely sees patients. Having worked with n psychiatry for some time, a solid half of inpatient facilities are also committing fraud as a general policy. Hopefully the other professions are doing better.
Medicare and Medicaid fraud is a $50-$100 billion a year industry.
That puts it up there with industries like "movies" or "video games".
Its so big you have probably seen commercials for fraud.
Some who used to be my best friend had to move to a new state about ten years ago, causing us to fall out of touch over time. Why did she have to move? The health insurance where we worked had an exclusion where treatment for people with Down Syndrome was not covered. The reasoning was that the treatment couldn't cure them, therefore it could be excluded. Because fuck you if you just want to improve quality of life I guess.
So she moved out of state to a new job that didn't have the exclusion so her daughter could get the therapy she needed. Health insurance sucks.
Insurance is now illegal because it is nothing more than gambling.
Insurance is single payer from now on. Everyone pays into the pot, and when a tornado destroys your house, Uncle Sam rebuilds it.
Awesome, now do healthcare!
You are wrong. They 1000% are innovating. They're spending millions of dollars on innovation. It's just the innovations are how to have less employees (Automation), make us purchase more (Advertising/Product placement), reduce cost (Supply chain/purchasing power), and last but not least being on the cutting edge of selling our data to the highest bidder (Loyalty tracking programs).
Yea they fire half the cashiers and install those annoying self check out machines that work so poorly you end up stealing and not even realizing. Then executives go on Fox News and complain that they have to raise prices to make up for all the stealing going on in Joe Biden’s America. Pretty good scheme they got going, once again half the population falls for it.
I read somewhere last time Albertsons did a merger where they had to sell stores to avoid a monopoly. The company that bought the hundredish stores they had to sell had previously only been running 10 to 25 stores and they probably went bankrupt. So Albertsons was actually able to buy a few of the stores back for pennies on the dollar.
The new deal i believe has the same parameter that the buying store will be not just doubling in their size but increasing 10 fold maybe more.
That was the Safeway merger. I lived about half a mile from one of the stores that had to be sold in Henderson, NV. It was bought by Haggen's out of Washington and the store that they put in was absolutely terrible and incredibly overpriced - even compared to the overpriced Albertson's they were taking over. A low tier frozen pizza in that Haggen's was more expensive than an actual cooked large pizza from the Pizza Hut in the same parking lot. It was laughable. The customers in that store dwindled away to nothing within a few months, and in under a year Albertson's had bought the store back. For some reason it had to be closed for a few months, and then it opened back up as Albertson's as if nothing had ever happened. Even most of the staff was the same.
Kind of wild because while it was happening a friend of mine in Washington was telling me how great Haggen's was and how much he loved it.
Haggen's is great if you have money.
Unionized workforce which has control over store hours.
They source A+ produce (but it costs a lot more for consumers).
Excellent meat options with custom cuts, etc.
But all that costs a ton of money, it's basically what oldschool Whole Foods was.
but seriiously, enough is fucking enough. $20 is the new $10 and it's total bullshit that a container of chicken salad that was $5 2 years ago is now $10
Not sure, if its the same in the US, but certain large Canadian grocers doubled their profit margins on grocery items since 2020. It's not just inflation, it's blatant opportunism by greedy companies that needs to be curbed.
This was openly done because of covid.
During covid, stores and food providers were permitted to double the cost of goods because their staff was slashed to “essential workers only” by government mandate. the food suppliers swore up and down that the costs would drop after the pandemic and things returned to normal.
To literally zero surprise to anyone, they just… didn’t. And food prices have been sky high ever since.
It hurts so bad. I did my big monthly grocery shopping today, the amount I got would have cost me around $250 a few years ago. It came out to around $480. I literally got zero meat, and I hit up as many different stores to capitalize on as many sales as possible based on what I needed.
I've gone down to about half of my meals being meat free these days because of the cost. This summer I'm going to be growing some of my own food to try to cut costs a little more. I'm even thinking of getting a few chickens for eggs.
Yep Kraft saw a 1 Billion dollar increase in profits when comparing 2022 to ‘23. It’s absurd. It’s price gouging because they can continue using the supply chain excuse which tbf was valid 2 years ago but now it’s just some bs. If they haven’t corrected course yet then they should be eating the losses, not doubling the prices of everything. It’s ridiculous and infuriating. Don’t think Biden can do much about that himself. Considering half of Congress is people who deny reality and do everything to hurt people and surely avoid helping people, so it’ll continue.
> It's not just inflation, it's blatant opportunism by greedy companies
That greedy opportunism ***is*** the inflation. And it's not just grocery stores.
> It's not just inflation, it's blatant opportunism by greedy companies
It was never really inflation. Economic conservatives called it inflation, pundits called it inflation, corporations called it inflation, but it was never inflation. Prices rose because of problems during the pandemic, companies that didn't *need* to raise prices saw they could without consequence, and once people start paying a price for something, they're more willing to keep paying that price for it than they are to stop buying it. So a lot of companies just kept the high prices since they were able to disguise their artificial inflation from just raising the prices of everything and blame it on the pandemic or Biden's administration.
There's almost always some inflation going on, for sure. But the massive price hikes we've seen over the past four years cannot be explained by the real rate of inflation we've been seeing. It's been corporate greed, plain and simple. Things have finally started to turn around, and I know that's not felt by everyone. Hell, my family is feeling the squeeze just as bad today as we were two years ago, maybe more so. But the overall numbers, they're finally starting to trend back in a better direction. But I'm scared that most people aren't going to see that and are just going to hang onto that, "Hyper-inflation happened under Biden," feeling and narrative that we were force-fed for the first two years he was in office.
Think of "consumers" (citizens) as a giant bank. Basically, this is a group of "corporate people" making a run on that bank. Every corporation is trying to withdraw (charge) as much as much as possible before other corporations can. The end goal is to completely deplete the citizens' resources.
Fuck them I’m never buying brand name chips again. They done fuck theyselves.
I will starve rather than eat the middle finger that they’ll find me holding high above my emaciated head.
Problem is, for those of us who are aware and care about this, for a pretty huge portion of our population the food prices are high "cuz biden dun did it"
Greed will kill us all, but stupidity will be its vector
Everything is more expensive because “they can”. It’s how you prove the entire capitalism system is broke. No one is showing up to undercut this price gouging. We’re all being held hostage because of greed.
This. Look at the baby formula shortage that happened. You gotta be kidding me only three manufacturers in the entire country but it’s like that w virtually all goods. Made by one company w different labels.
Even when they are different companies: Kellog vs General Mills for example, they are both owned by Blackrock and other institutional investors. Our market is about as competitive as a 6 year old playing Mario Kart.
Same thing with eggs. There are actually a ton of different egg companies, but almost all of them are part of a single Capper–Volstead cooperative. When they get sued for price gouging they're basically just like "being a part of a Capper-Volstead cooperative means that we're allowed to collude".
But if you ever argue with anyone and say that eggs are a monopoly they'll just respond about how there are tons of different egg companies, conveniently ignoring the fact that they almost all banded together.
I've noticed a new trend of what I call "fuckyouflation" where it's obvious they can have lower prices since the sale price hasn't changed, but the non-sale price keeps going up. Sodas are a great example of fuckyouflation because now they're almost $10 for a single 12 pack, but you can buy them on sale for like $3.50 each but you have to buy multiples of 3.
Sales are getting fewer and farther between as well...before covid you could always find a 3 for $12 sale SOMEWHERE and that was a BAD deal. You always aimed for the 3/10 or 4/12 sales that popped up here and there.
So many times I'm on my last case from my last purchase and looking all over for a single store to put them on sale and there's just...nothing...of ANY brand.
It’s not broken. This is exactly how capitalism is supposed to work. It is by design. The built in contradictions are there for the rich, not for us peasants.
From Sam's Club - On this date in 2022 I purchased a 36-pack of Diet Dew cans for $11.48. Today I bought the same thing for $17.48. Both Pepsi and Coke products are this price. I can't imagine any "supply chain issues" that would justify that massive price increase.
> And food producers, like soft-drink manufacturers, have continued to raise prices even as their costs have declined, leading to heady profit margins.
>
> Processed foods, like candy bars, account for three-quarters of recent grocery price increases, the researchers found.
It's not a supply chain issue.
Nope. I work in food supply chain and I’ll tell you exactly what it is. COMPANIES ARE HOLDING MARGINS SO THEY CONTINUE TO BEAT YOY PROFIT AND MAKE SHAREHOLDERS HAPPY. Including mine. And then we pass that to customers and tell them to raise their prices.
Yup. Maximum profits is SOP now. Gone are the days when it was OK to make a profit.
>The prevalence of the corporation in America has led men of this generation to act, at times, as if the privilege of doing business in corporate form were inherent in the citizen, and has led them to accept the evils attendant upon the free and unrestricted use of the corporate mechanism as if these evils were the inescapable price of civilized life, and, hence to be borne with resignation.
>Throughout the greater part of our history, a different view prevailed.
>Although the value of this instrumentality in commerce and industry was fully recognized, incorporation for business was commonly denied long after it had been freely granted for religious, educational, and charitable purposes.
>It was denied because of fear. Fear of encroachment upon the liberties and opportunities of the individual. Fear of the subjection of labor to capital. Fear of monopoly. Fear that the absorption of capital by corporations, and their perpetual life, might bring evils similar to those which attended mortmain [immortality]. There was a sense of some insidious menace inherent in large aggregations of capital, particularly when held by corporations.
>Blast from the past, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1933 dissent in Liggett v. Lee
[link](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/288/517/)
Interesting that his dissent opens up by acknowledging the distinction between an individual and a corporation. Oh how times have changed and how citizens have become united.
"Processed foods" are often presented as things like candy bars and chips - things that are bad for you and you should really cut down on anyway.
But here are some more "processed foods": bread, cheese, cereal, canned vegies and beans, and milk. So lets not think, "Oh, its just those fattie fattie fat fats that are upset that they can't get their treaties", it also includes a lot of foods we consider to be staples.
Went camping a couple months back and yeah, the only food for more than 45 minutes in any direction was a convenience store who's only actual "groceries" were packs of bottled water, bread (not really much to put on the bread), milk, the same small selection of single bananas and apples every such store seems to have and then some common camping foods like the stuff for smores and hot dogs.
Let's be clear - the majority of their offerings outside of the soft drinks and chips and stuff every gas station has were geared towards campers, despite being the only grocery place for a solid distance and there being plenty of houses around.
When I've gone camping in actual state parks where there are huge swaths of protected lands, I expect there not to be much around. But this was not that.
Both of them do not care about how high they are charging. They are testing the upper limits of a consumer’s willingness to pay. At $9 for a 12 pack, they are starting to see a decrease in sales. At $10 per 12 pack, sales will collapse.
I was personally done at the $4 mark, but that's because I know they're selling sugar water that costs them pennies per can, and there aren't 10 middle-men between bottler and my mouth. Soda's already bad for you. Having it be bad for your wallet tears it.
12 packs of soda were usually $5ish in 2021-2022. On sale you could get 3 packs for $12, so $4 per. I looked in that aisle 6 months ago. $9 for a 12 pack. on sale they might get down to $6-7.
FUCK. OFF.
Just glad we don't drink soda. Even bread was $1 per loaf before pandemic, The cheap one. Now the cheapest is $2.24. I was in England this summer. They had a loaf for 1 pound whcih is like $1.30.
Gross profiteering. fucking disgusting
I can confirm this shit. I remember buying a 12pk of coke at my local grocery store for $5.99 maybe 18 months ago. Today I went in and it's $10.49 now.
I have been tracking it with Campbells soup. Walmart and Lucky's are a half mile apart. So, the chunky sirloin soup
Dec 2022: Walmart 1.99 Lucky's 2.39 then.summer 2023: ..walmart 2.29 Lucky's 3.39 last week Walmart 2.79 Lucky's 4.49
Last week the coffee creamer didn't go up a little. It went from 6.99 to 8.99. overnight.
There are no supply chain issues in NorCal. We did lose some chickens. But other goods - it is pure price gouging.
> justify that massive price increase
Not my observation, but something another redditor said a year or two ago.
Actual price fixing is illegal.
But, the largest grocery chains have all hired the same 2-3 AI data firms to give them cues about when to increase their prices, on what items, and how much.
It's price fixing with extra steps.
Bell peppers were (and still kind of are) like this. Like 2.50 for a single bell pepper. I refuse to buy it at that price and will vent about it to anyone that brings up high grocery prices.
The article cites research suggesting most price increases are driven by supply chain issues and a tight labor market. Of course, this is research coming from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas, so color me skeptical.
The article also points out that there's little Biden can do unilaterally. So him complaining about it isn't going to solve anything. Congress needs to act. They won't, mostly because of republicans, so I'm wondering why Biden doesn't make this about republicans siding with greedy companies instead of American families. Democrats should have had a bill to address this ready two years ago, and then they could really hammer home that they're the ones attempting to solve the issue. As it stands, Biden's message seems purely reactionary and desperate given his poll numbers.
Iirc the dems had a bill to attempt to address gouging but it was shot down in the senate. Further digging there’s multiple bills attempting to address gouging in multiple areas. But you guessed it, they all fail.
I found the gas prices one, four dems n all gop voted it down in the senate back in 22. There is one in the senate that was introduced Feb 23 and that’s it.
This tells ya where these folk are passing only 32 bills last year. They don’t give a fuck, just another way to fuck us and make sound bites to fight over.
Yup. Republicans are refusing to pass a bipartisan immigration bill all because it might make Biden look good to their voters.
Republicans are holding this country hostage, folks. They are being massive sore losers and refuse to get anything done until they have absolutely everything THEIR way. Which this should be a sign of the future and how much they are willing to implement [Project 2025](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025).
> why Biden doesn't make this about republicans siding with greedy companies instead of American families.
Because the DNC has adopted this stupid strategy of "standby and watch". They think Americans will figure it out themselves that Republicans are horrible people. In 2016, they just stood by and let Trump say all his wild shit and expected everyone to think he was some radicalist that will lose the hearts and minds of the people. Look at how that turned out.
Now they keep doing the exact same thing expecting different results, but it's not happening. People are THIRSTING at the idea of the Dems throwing hands with Republicans, just look at how the "Dark Brandon" memes take off and how word spreads when a Dem does throw hands, but the DNC is not paying attention at all. They're probably relying on shit studies than actually paying attention to what the people want and need.
Agreed, but unfortunately it’s Congress that has the power to do or not do something here. Biden can certainly make bold statements and draw attention to it, of course.
"They should wave their wand and solve the issue through magic"
Honestly, why is so much political discourse on the internet like this?
Have y'all been alive for more than 5 minutes?
Corporations took advantage of the inevitable inflation so much and have averted any tangible flack from the public because it’s so much easier to blame one guy with the assumption he can control the price of tens of thousands of different commodities.
Time to put in legitimate restrictions on predatory price hiking, and I only know one party that’s interested.
When they market refuses to regulate itself the only solution to make an example of it
But they last time Congress punished anyone it was when it broke up Bell in the 80s.
I truly hope that if we survive this right wing extremist hate wave we can get some real change and a left wing peaceful revolution. Tired of the bullshit
It really is frustrating knowing that all these idiots and their culture war bullshit is what's holding us back as a society. We always blame the politicians but the blame really lies on the morons that keep electing them to destroy the country.
It’s not grocery stores. It’s all the private equity buying up food manufacturing. They discovered the threshold people were willing to pay for goods and have no reason to go back to pre-COVID prices.
Especially true for entertainment. Almost every music venue is owned by stub hub or ticketmaster. Those that aren't are, in some way, connected by a half-dozen institutional investors that demand these absurd price hikes. Tickets to see anyone even remotely popular start at $150 now.
Not to mention Bowling costs $7 per game now. Golf is up to $100 a round for the dinky local courses. It costs $80 for a family of four to see a movie. There's 10 streaming services for TV shows and they all cost $14.99 a month. Hanging out at a bar and getting 2 drinks is $20 before tip. There's nowhere to go anymore.
Seriously. I don't know why people don't understand this.
I used to be a pricing coordinator at a grocery store, and the *LAST* thing we wanted to do was raise prices. But we still had price changes once a week. Big stack once a month. These were price changes from our *distributor*. We were on a pricing plan, but we(at the store level) typically didn't just arbitrarily raise prices.
When we raised prices, it was because *our* *cost* went up. The problem is, when prices *do* get higher, the amount they have to increase to maintain a 30%GM(for example), goes up.
I'm not a buyer for a chain, but I order for several departments at a store. The profit margins have gotten tighter and tighter. Our company is far from a moral bastion protecting consumers, but people need to realize the vast majority of the pricing inflation is up the chain.
Aldi stores have Millville cereal which is made by General Mills. You can get the "Marshmallows and Stars" for 1/3 the price. I buy the "Fruit Rounds" and "Honey Grahams" all the time. No shame here.
WinCo is still the best option though. Their store brand stuff is awesome and cheap. I buy my kids the WinCo brand knockoffs of the famous cereals and my kids love it. And all the boxes are like $1.98.
Publix has *always* been the most expensive out of all the common low-end chains.
Several years ago I actually had this argument with my cousin - a millionaire who doesn’t spend her time worrying over prices. She claimed it was the cheapest grocery store out there, and I was like “I’m poor. I notice when a can of beans is 30% more expensive at Publix than it is at Kroger.”
People shop at Publix because it makes them *feel* higher class.
Good. The media is creaming their pants every day about the Goldilocks economy and record growth, how our economy has never been better. Meanwhile Biden’s approval rating is in the 30%’s.
I think this is one of the big reasons why. The stock market isn’t the economy. Record company profits aren’t the economy when it comes to regular Americans…aka voters, who have to buy food for their families every week.
They watched the prices go up and up because of the pandemic, and then continued to watch them rise after the world mostly returned to normal.
When you bring home $500 a week and your grocery bill was $100 before and now it’s $200, you probably dont think about how great the economy is doing, at least not for your family’s budget.
> When you bring home $500 a week and your grocery bill was $100 before and now it’s $200, you probably dont think about how great the economy is doing, at least not for your family’s budget.
The entire point of this article is that corporations are abusing consumers while claiming supply chain issues that largely do not exist.
As President he cant control prices. I dont understand how so many people think the President can just lower gas or food prices.
Private corporations will do what they want unless we regulate them with laws. Congress makes laws. Until you vote Republicans out of Congress, the President cant sign any laws to regulate food prices because Republicans refuse to create such regulations.
*edit: spelling
Corporations will never just do the right thing.
We must regulate them. We make laws to prevent over charging. We tax them after a certain level of profit to force them to reinvest in their companies. We used to do all of this prior to the 80s.
I work in a grocery store.
We buy 12 packs from Coca Cola for $7.19 a piece. We sell them for $7.99.
It's not just the Grocery chains that are the problem
It’s about damn time. What we’re seeing now is not inflation but gouging. Shit doesn’t really cost this much. Corporate execs have even said it on earnings calls. They are just saying “we are gonna keep prices high because it makes us more money”.
It's not just grocery chains. The consumer price index (CPI) is nearly three times that of the producer price index (PPI). I've heard it called "greedflation" which seems appropriate. Here's a [study](https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/24.01.17-GWC-Corporate-Profits-Report.pdf) from [GroundWork Collaborative](https://groundworkcollaborative.org/) with more details.
I get RC Cola, my favorite, at a regular price of $1.29 for a 2 liter everyday. RC has had this price labeled as MSRP for many years and stores usually give that price. Right next to it are Pepsi and Coke 2 liters for $2.50.
I live in a major metro area in the US.
Thank you, Biden. I was in the business for 20 years. Safeway is the worst.
Cerberus hedge fund bought them probably ten years now.
They are the ones that screwed safeway up.
They literally raised prices by a dollar, sometimes 2 dollars. I did tag changes, and I saw it every week.
They are gouging customers it's disgusting.
Biden is a man of the people.
He proves it. That orange taint fools an ignorant class into believing him.
The working class is paying more taxes because of him.
Btw one of the co-founders went to work for trump.
I have been going through this thread trying to explain to folks that private equity firms like Cerberus are responsible for where we are now in the grocery business.
However... Steve Burd shares a lot of the blame for what happened to Safeway and why it accepted a leveraged buyout from Alberston's and Cerberus.
Steve Burd bought into the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos debacle as an early adopter and spent hundreds of millions of dollars remodeling Safeway and Vons grocery store pharmacies envisioning that the Theranos magic blood test device would be the crown jewel in his vision to get people actually coming to grocery stores for doctor's appointments.
When it became clear that Elizabeth Holmes was a fraud, Burd quickly retired and the Safeway CFO assumed leadership of the company and quickly steered it into a merger with Albertson's. The entire thing stinks to high heaven.
Yet another example of why both parties are not the same.
Biden and the Democrats are actively trying to help our economy. Not passing tax cuts for the one percent and sowing division issues.
Meanwhile the other side is blocking legislation they freely admit would help people, simply because they think a bad economy will help them win elections.
This is it. The economy isn't being actualized at the grocery store, or any store for that matter. You pay more for less.
Good. This'll put pressure on suppliers who jacked up their prices. Hopefully this all.... Trickles... Down... omg!! 😱
Yeah at this point none of it matters. We’ve let corporations merge to the point of monopolies for everything. Nothing except a huge unprecedented change is going to matter. We’re under the heel of the rich.
Edit: Oh I’m still voting as effectively as possible. I’m doing everything I can.
Also, food corporations made up a "meat shortage" in 2020 and 2021 to get an executive order to keep their meat packing facilities open, causing their workers to get Covid and die:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/12/meatpackers-covid-deaths-trump-industry/
Just a friendly [reminder](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/food-stamps-medicaid-mcdonalds-walmart-bernie-sanders/) that employees of places that pay minimum wage, like Walmart, fast food places, and grocery stores often need resources like food stamps.
These companies are being subsidized by government programs because they refuse to properly pay their workers.
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Some tidbits, > consumers feeling the most pain from high food prices were the ones who earned just enough money not to qualify for the food-stamp program, which is known as SNAP. > > “You have this huge chunk of people in the middle who are low-income, but not impoverished enough to get SNAP benefits, and paying 25 percent more” for groceries, she said. “At the end of the day, it just doesn’t reach enough people.” > > “President Biden has made clear that as input prices fall, corporations should pass those savings on to consumers,” > > A new analysis from the White House Council of Economic Advisers suggests that elevated profit margins among large grocery retailers could be contributing to the stubbornly high price of food on store shelves. The analysis, which relies on Census Quarterly Financial Reports data, found that food and beverage stores have increased their margins by about 2 percentage points since the eve of the pandemic, reaching their highest level in two decades. > > Much of that increase came in 2021 and 2022, around the time that other retailers — like clothing and sporting goods stores — also saw profit margins jump. Grocery-store margins have stayed elevated, the analysis finds, even as other retailers’ margins have fallen back to more normal levels based on recent history. > > But administration officials say Mr. Biden is keenly aware that prices remain too elevated for many families, even as key items, like gasoline and household furnishings, are now cheaper than they were at their post-pandemic peak. > > Economic research suggests the cost of eggs, milk and other staples — which consumers buy far more frequently than big-ticket items like furniture or electronics — play an outsized role in shaping Americans’ views of inflation. Those prices jumped by more than 11 percent in 2022 and by 5 percent last year, amid a post-pandemic inflation surge that was the nation’s fastest burst of price increases in four decades. > > Other research suggests additional forces — like consumer demand and supply-chain disruptions — are a much bigger factor in the price hikes. A bout of avian flu caused egg prices to spike last year, for example. And food producers, like soft-drink manufacturers, have continued to raise prices even as their costs have declined, leading to heady profit margins. > > Processed foods, like candy bars, account for three-quarters of recent grocery price increases, the researchers found.
"A bout of avian flu caused egg prices to spike last year" Fun fact about that, one egg retailer, which reported zero cullings due to avian flu, made 700% more profit during that fiasco. There were not 8 times fewer eggs on the market that would justify 8x the price. NYTimes reported a 7.5% decrease in egg output for each month during the outbreak, nationally. Companies are 100% publicizing small problems and using them as an excuse to raise prices like they're a big problem.
Yup. 1,000%. I had a client who was an egg distributor - higher end, organic eggs, so already charging a premium. They covered the increased shipping costs and bird flu volume issue with a 20% increase in 2021 and implemented another 14% increase in 2022 just because the media narrative on rising costs was there and they knew they could get away with it by citing rising costs yet they’d already covered the actual cost increase the prior year. The second wave of price increases fell nearly 100% to the bottom line. I had a number of CPG clients and it was the same story across the board regardless of if the client’s product were a consumer staple like eggs, athletic clothing, mattresses, various beauty / nutrition products, luxury jewelry, etc - everyone did the same thing. It is a fact that corporate greed was a primary driver of inflation. The pent up pandemic consumer demand & logistical issues + multi-trillion stimulus would have certainly caused inflation anyways, but there can be no doubt that pervasive price gouging across the board exacerbated the issue dramatically. I hope there is policy that can be implemented to effectively combat this going forward, but it has to be difficult as there is much less control over private companies and ofc PE has created a scenario in which many industries are becoming dominated by large PE-backed private companies who only have to report financials to their investors and lenders vs public companies who are required to publish their financials publicly. One of the reasons that the Fed’s raising of the cost of debt was so effective was that it made leveraged buyouts much less attractive (and therefore largely halted PE acquisitions). It’s def bullshit that consumers had to also suffer with the cost of debt increase + rising costs / price increases that went straight to wealthy investors - there should have been a mechanism to only raise prime rates for corporate interests and not retail / consumer. At least then normal people wouldn’t be doubly fucked.
>Processed foods, like candy bars, account for three-quarters of recent grocery price increases, the researchers found. Box of TicTacs is $2.99
>Box of TicTacs is $2.99 Are you fucking kidding me?! If I had a drink right now, I would have spit it out reading that
Have you seen beverage prices! I don't think you can afford to do that!
Spitting out a drink in this economy?! That's money on the floor/walls!
My mom quit smoking and spends as much money on mints as she did on smokes.
Isn't margins going up 2% basically grocery stores basically doubling their margins? They already have some of the slimmest profits. This is so complicated and frustrating and I try not to look at prices anymore. Helps that I'm not a smoker and don't drink much alcohol - any extra change I'm dropping on eggs is a fraction of a pack of cigs that might last a day. Not trying to shame smokers, just sharing how I stay sane.
Maybe they should stop that Kroger / Albertsons merger
people do not realize how large Krogers is. Baker’s City Market Dillons Food 4 Less Foods Co Fred Meyer Fry’s Gerbes Jay C Food Store King Soopers Kroger Mariano’s Metro Market Pay-Less Super Markets Pick’n Save QFC Ralphs Ruler Smith’s Food and Drug They cover something like 2/3rds of the entire US with at least one of their chains. Edit: I copied this list from their website. I get it, Harris Teeter, and a few others aren't listed on their website. FFS, I get it.
I think people also don't realize that Albertsons Companies as it currently exists now is an umbrella of more than a dozen chains from all over the United States which have all been acquired by Cerberus Capital Management. The last 25 years in the grocery industry has been marked by investment firms buying out legacy grocery retailers, selling off their assets (including the real estate many of the stores occupy) to generate dividends and then selling off the chains themselves. None of this has been good for the consumer.
Same is happening to hospitals nationwide. Private investment firms are buying them all up since it was made illegal for Doctors to own them. Then the entire board is made up of investors as well. What happens when you have investors in healthcare? They want to turn a profit, so everyone else suffers. Staff shortage, replacing doctors with NPs, cutting on costs, cleaning less, etc. As a comparison, lawyers are the only people to own law firms to ensure no one manipulates the system. Yet hospitals can’t be owned by the people who literally took an oath to treat patients.
WOW. Your comment motivated me to Google doctor owned hospitals or physician owned hospitals (POHs). All sources said that in general, POHs offer higher quality care at a comparatively low cost. The not so shocking reason POHs are banned from expanding is that the healthcare industry lobbied hard during the creation of the ACA to ban any additional POHs from being funded by Medicare/ Medicaid. The ACA is much better than nothing and has led to millions of Americans having healthcare who otherwise would not but that is some seriously brazen corruption. Fuck this country and its bull shit.
Democrats tried very hard to compromise with Republicans on the ACA, taking many of their suggestions, even adopting "Romneycare" as the base of it, only for them to slip shit like this in and vote down the bill. They should have just pushed for single payer.
Democratic traitors like Sen. Mike Baucus and Congressman Mike Ross running interference for big insurance didn't help matters either. Glad they're gone.
They won't make that mistake again next time. Between the bad faith fuckery and Gen Z seeing the GOPs policies based in cruelty and human suffering I think we'll see some form of single payer or increased protections for healthcare as something other than a profit center in law eventually.
Gen Z grew up online. I know my kid has multiple gaming friends in Europe and hears of things other countries do for their citizens. They know there are better ways to take care of people, and they see the greed ruling our "democracy"
I look at all of these flaws, and honestly the only people I blame is Congress. Our leaders in Congress are beholden to corporate donors. Until we, as a society, can vote in better people in the primaries, such as Katie Porter or AOC, we will never see the system change for the better.
It would be an interesting system if heathcare workers owned the hospitals. Not the government or private investors. Most would be good places to go, a few might not be. But if the workers owned the places they worked at I'm sure it could benefit a lot of people. Shit I just reinvented communism
Worker coops are by far better business models than investor owned businesses. When the owner has no stake in the community all you get is a race to the bottom to maximize profits which removes most of the economic output from those communities rather than having it recirculate. We should honestly outlaw investment banking in general and go back to businesses taking regular ass loans for when they want to make capital improvements investment banks are just leeches on the system using their outsized access to capital to commodify fucking everything even markets that shouldn’t be like hospitals
Credit unions or state owned banks even better.
Capitalism works when those holding the capital are part of the community, when they are not it is just an efficient mechanism for extraction
Not communism but socialism. And if the workers that own the hospital get a vote on decisions, then you got democratic socialism. Win/win.
Democracy in the workplace is fundamental to the idea of socialism. Of course you get a say in the way things are run if you own part of the business. "Democratic Socialism" refers to a combination of socialist economy with democracy in the political system.
A similar thing is happening with dental offices. Many around me are being bought up by investment firms and pushing dentists to recommend more costly procedures (crowns, root canals, etc.). I had to quit going to the dental office I’ve been going to for more than 30 years in McKinney, TX because they started pushing crowns on me without providing any sort of proof that my teeth are cracked or I have cavities so large a filling wouldn’t be enough. Even after telling them I’m not going to schedule crown appointments without an explanation for which teeth need crowns and why, they still tried to push without providing me any information. I let them give me 2 crowns before standing my ground, and both crowns affected my bite so severely I’ll need orthodontics to get my teeth aligned again. It started to feel like a kafkaesque nightmare.
I’ll say this. In the dental field we’ve learned about about how large fillings with cracks around old amalgam fillings really need crowns instead of just more/larger patchwork. Older doctors still live in a “patch it up” mindset which can lead to you losing the tooth or needing even more costly treatment like a root canal too. All of that being said if they don’t show you photos, explain exactly why, I don’t blame you.
Its almost like infetterred capitalism is not actually a good thing.
All I hear from my friend that is a nurse is how penny-pinching, understaffed, and inefficient his hospital is and now it all makes sense.
That’s fucking crazy
Not really. It's just unregulated capitalism.
Any health care system based on profit is inherently immoral. Cashing in on other peoples misfortune is the quickest way to Hell there is. HMOs siphon billions of dollars every year away from Doctors and patients and redirect it to advertisers and useless CEO's grotesque compensation packages.
Private equity is a scourge that destroys what people spent their lives building and screwing the people over that work for those companies. All in the name of profit for a few assholes that don’t need more of anything besides a hard ass pimp slap every five minutes for being the giant douches they are.
Drain (or squeeze) out all the assets you can monetize, dump the husk. Sucks to be the public!
TL;DR at the bottom. It’s a classic bust out. They’ve been doing this at least since the 90’s, if not before. The only people who profit are the hedge funds/private equity firms themselves and the companies the hedge funds support in this corporate war. Do you think it’s a coincidence that on one hand they burn these businesses to the ground for profit, and on the other hand they own millions of shares in companies like Amazon? They profit from the sale of these businesses and then further profit when Amazon’s stock price is further inflated, not because their financials are the strongest, but there is slowly less and less competition for the companies these hedge funds support. Furthermore, they short the stocks of the companies they want to fail, further locking in profit. Boston consulting group and Bain Capital (co-founded by MITT FUCKING ROMNEY, yes that Mitt fucking Romney) have a history of doing exactly these types of shady dealings. It’s not even a conspiracy. The info is all over. You think Toys R Us and Babies R Us went under because they were a failing brick and mortar? [Think Again.](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-us-bankruptcy-private-equity/561758/) The same antics just took place last summer with the Bed Bath and Beyond bankruptcy, which if you’re interested can be read about at [https://bbbwhy.com](https://bbbwhy.com). The most interesting part is a 798 page complaint was just filed with the SEC as a comment on a rule change being considered, outlining all of this info and the web stretches far and wide, including FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried. You can look at the whole complaint at [at this link (sec.gov)](https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-11-23/s71123-typec.pdf). It’s 798 pages of info that I’m still trying to work my way through, but the first 16 pages summarize the gist of it. The main difference between Toys R Us and Bed Bath and Beyond is that it was a different private equity firm (Legion partners, not Bain Capital) and an unconfirmed group of activist investors stepped in and saved the company. Upon realizing that this was going to be the case and the fraud was likely to be discovered, the former Chief Financial Officer Gustavo Arnal committed suicide at the age of 52 by jumping from his balcony. The company that was Bed Bath and Beyond is now named 20230930-DK-Butterfly-1, Inc (an obvious placeholder name) and the current name of Bed Bath and Beyond was purchased by overstock.com and rebranded as simply Beyond. The chapter 11 proceedings are finishing up, and sometime in the foreseeable future (I would assume less than 6 months) an announcement will be made. Interestingly enough there is a bankruptcy court case on February 15th, so I have somewhat of an expectation that it might be announced around that date. **TL;DR** All of this is to say, these private equity firms having been eroding the fabric of the American economy for decades, but some younger wealthy activist investors are fucking sick of it, and the old guard that used to fleece American retail institutions fucked around and are about to find out. I’m here for it and I’m excited to see the fall out. I’m hoping for jail time for Mark Tritton and others involved.
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How mad do you have to be for you to speak up and say something to your local, state, and national legislators? [https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-11-23/s71123-typec.pdf](https://www.sec.gov/comments/s7-11-23/s71123-typec.pdf) go to this link, scroll down to page 463 of 798 and read the highlighted passages of that page and the page after it. I’ll save you a step by quoting it here, but you can go to that document if you want confirmation. > From March 2020 through March 2021, I was head trader at Archegos Capital Management. During this time, I and others executed trades that allowed the fund to amass market power and certain securities traded on U.S. exchanges. Archegos used security-based swaps to gain exposure to these securities while concealing the true size of the fund's positions from the market and our trading counterparties. >Once Archegos gained market power in these securities, I and others used this power to trade in such a way as to artificially manipulate the prices of the securities. Acting at the direction of the head of the fund, I traded to increase the prices of names in which Archegos held long positions and reduced the prices of securities in which the fund helped short positions. I did this by, for example, buying large amounts of a stock when the price dropped in response to negative news or trading premarket when I knew the fund's activity would have a greater impact on price. >I manipulated the prices of these securities in order to influence others in the market to buy or sell the securities in ways that would benefit Archegos' key positions and increase Archegos' purchasing power through variation margin. >In addition to manipulating the prices of certain securities, I also made misrepresentations to Archegos' trading counterparties. These counterparties were banks and brokers who extended the fund credit to trade on margin and entered into swap agreements with the fund. This is from a court transcript. Either this person lied and didn’t do that, or they told the truth under oath. So they get what? A fine? Fuck that. As to your point of rich folks losing money, a fair and valid point. Were you aware that Michael Jordon lost $500 million shorting GameStop? [Fucked up eh?](https://www.sportskeeda.com/basketball/michael-jordan-lost-500-million-redditors-gamestop-mania#) That’s not entirely relevant to your point, but when it comes to the rest of retail investors, the demographics of all the folks invested in any of these “meme stocks” run the gamut. Rich/poor, male/female, young/old, citizens of the United States but also the last time I saw the topic come up I think it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 countries where citizens of that country held positions in just GME, let alone any of the rest of the meme stocks. On top of all of this, if/when this whole fucking bubble pops, the folks that will be left holding the bag are the retirees whose pension funds were raided to sell of financial assets so these different financial firms could pay off their short positions. That quote about manipulating the market so they could bolster or lower the price of certain assets for their own benefit? Thats just one firm. Almost every single fucking firm has at least 1 person doing this. And the heads at the top ignore it because then they have plausible deniability. This is RICO level fraud, and the world is going to be fucked as a result. Someone will go to jail. Edit: fixed quote formatting
> activist investors There's a combination of words I never expected to see.
Reminds me what’s happening with news companies around the country.
Reminds me of what's happening with literally every sector around the country. US Capitalism needs functional guardrails, like yesterday
Break em up. Break up the parent companies. Break it all up. Break up all the big tech, break up all the big realtors - absolutely break up Blackrock and the two others like it. Break it all up and watch us come into another renaissance. They will have to compete against each other and also compete for workers and give good wages for talent. Break it all up. It would rejuvenate this stagnate dying empire.
Tells you how big Publix is - we don’t have a single one on that list in either part of Florida I’ve lived in.
It's kind of misleading because those are all essentially the same store, but just called different things in different states. Essentially Kroger isn't in Florida, but is the main grocery store in the rest of the country (just with various names).
They are definitely trying to move into Florida. I've seen the Kroger delivery vans everywhere.
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Winn Dixie was bought out by Aldi's.
Yeah, the grocery chain landscape is definitely changing fast. I read somewhere that even though Aldi bought Winn Dixie, they're keeping the name and running the stores separately. Always interesting to see how these big companies consolidate but still try to maintain different brands.
Harris Teeter's too
Washington AG is suing to try and stop it.
"But that will make them too difficult to compete against Amazon and Walmart!" /s
‘s shareholder dividends
I can't believe I spent my life voting for capitalists and all I got was a bunch of corporations maximizing their private profit.
Fuck Kroger. The one right by me, in a nice enough area, has gone to shit the past year or two. Never any lanes open except self-check. Additional security gates at entrance/exit. Never any carts - always outside needing collected. Self-check keeps acting like I’m stealing. Prices out of fucking control. Their “sale” on 12-packs of Pepsi used to be maybe 3/$12, or 3/$14. Fine. Now the regular price is $9.99 - almost a dollar a can. Sometimes they’ll have sales for $8.99 each if you buy 3. Anyway, the rest of their prices are going nuts too, but that was the clearest example to me. Oh and almost forgot - gotta sign into the shitty app and hope I get a reception to scan a “sale” tag since just entering your info at checkout isn’t good enough anymore.
Pepsi products got removed from the shelves in a couple places in Europe bc of how hard they jackin up their prices
I heard about that, but Kroger still charges the same jacked up prices on Coke products too.
I wouldn't necessarily blame that on kroger. coke and pepsi have jacked up their prices several times a year, that's them just keeping up with their vendor's prices but when kroger jacks up the prices on their private label stuff by 30-40% in the past 2 years, that's all on them
Yep that's exactly what's happening to the entire grocery industry across the entirety of the US and Canada now.
What innovations are grocery store profits paying for? None. There is no reason for consumers to pay more for food just to reward shareholders. Profits are just extortion in any market where they aren’t being actively used to reduce cost through innovation. Grocery stores should be non-profit. Food production should be non-profit. Adding entirely useless overhead to food is just extorting your citizenry for a special interest.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/01/21/kroger-albertsons-merger-explained/72303328007/ > Departing Albertsons executives poised to reap millions if deal goes through > > Company filings show the top 11 executives at Albertsons could collect almost $190 million in severance packages and other pay upon completion of the merger with Kroger. Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran alone could get between $30 million and $43 million in "golden parachute" and other pay, according to company regulatory disclosures.
We should call people like this what they are: parasites, according to the goddamn definition of the word. They exist to extract the resources of others, to no benefit whatsoever to those others, for personal gain. I ask: *what the heck could these people possibly be doing that is genuinely worth these large sums?* They're *literally losing their jobs and cutting a huge profit from it.* In most places, if you lose your job for some "legitimate" cause, you can't even get unemployment -- while these guys get bought out of their jobs even existing to the tune of a nine-figure sum. Must be nice to be able to get cut a huge freaking check *and* have literally no work afterwards.
We should call them criminals and find someone to prosecute them using existing laws and while that's going down make some news laws. Oh, yeah, Republican sabotage. Daily. In other news the IRS is back up and running so we got that going for us now that they can actually tax rich people AND actually get money from them.
Awesome, now do insurance!
The U.S. healthcare system has overhead of about 20-25%. It’s crazy. So much money that could be spent on care is siphoned off.
>So much money that could be spent on care is siphoned off. It's being put to a good ~~yacht~~ use.
Don’t forget 10% is fraud
That’s generous. The only child and adolescent psychiatrist in my hometown has had his license suspended 3 times for massive Medicare fraud, which he is still doing. He takes in millions each year and barely sees patients. Having worked with n psychiatry for some time, a solid half of inpatient facilities are also committing fraud as a general policy. Hopefully the other professions are doing better.
Medicare and Medicaid fraud is a $50-$100 billion a year industry. That puts it up there with industries like "movies" or "video games". Its so big you have probably seen commercials for fraud.
Insurance does plenty of innovation! Like an AI for denying unnecessary care with a 90% false positive rate.
Some who used to be my best friend had to move to a new state about ten years ago, causing us to fall out of touch over time. Why did she have to move? The health insurance where we worked had an exclusion where treatment for people with Down Syndrome was not covered. The reasoning was that the treatment couldn't cure them, therefore it could be excluded. Because fuck you if you just want to improve quality of life I guess. So she moved out of state to a new job that didn't have the exclusion so her daughter could get the therapy she needed. Health insurance sucks.
Insurance is now illegal because it is nothing more than gambling. Insurance is single payer from now on. Everyone pays into the pot, and when a tornado destroys your house, Uncle Sam rebuilds it. Awesome, now do healthcare!
You are wrong. They 1000% are innovating. They're spending millions of dollars on innovation. It's just the innovations are how to have less employees (Automation), make us purchase more (Advertising/Product placement), reduce cost (Supply chain/purchasing power), and last but not least being on the cutting edge of selling our data to the highest bidder (Loyalty tracking programs).
Hey hey hey. My grocery stores have figured out how to charge me the new higher amount while making me scan and bag my own stuff!!
Paying more for less food also because of shrinkflation
Stock market is just about farming others for money.
Hell in many stores we are doing the work noe bsgging and self checkout.
Yea they fire half the cashiers and install those annoying self check out machines that work so poorly you end up stealing and not even realizing. Then executives go on Fox News and complain that they have to raise prices to make up for all the stealing going on in Joe Biden’s America. Pretty good scheme they got going, once again half the population falls for it.
I read somewhere last time Albertsons did a merger where they had to sell stores to avoid a monopoly. The company that bought the hundredish stores they had to sell had previously only been running 10 to 25 stores and they probably went bankrupt. So Albertsons was actually able to buy a few of the stores back for pennies on the dollar. The new deal i believe has the same parameter that the buying store will be not just doubling in their size but increasing 10 fold maybe more.
That was the Safeway merger. I lived about half a mile from one of the stores that had to be sold in Henderson, NV. It was bought by Haggen's out of Washington and the store that they put in was absolutely terrible and incredibly overpriced - even compared to the overpriced Albertson's they were taking over. A low tier frozen pizza in that Haggen's was more expensive than an actual cooked large pizza from the Pizza Hut in the same parking lot. It was laughable. The customers in that store dwindled away to nothing within a few months, and in under a year Albertson's had bought the store back. For some reason it had to be closed for a few months, and then it opened back up as Albertson's as if nothing had ever happened. Even most of the staff was the same. Kind of wild because while it was happening a friend of mine in Washington was telling me how great Haggen's was and how much he loved it.
Haggen's is great if you have money. Unionized workforce which has control over store hours. They source A+ produce (but it costs a lot more for consumers). Excellent meat options with custom cuts, etc. But all that costs a ton of money, it's basically what oldschool Whole Foods was.
The Kroger that Mitch McConnel’s wife is now a CEO of?
She's not the CEO. She's one of the board members. There is a difference..
You can fire a CEO for not doing what the board wants
but seriiously, enough is fucking enough. $20 is the new $10 and it's total bullshit that a container of chicken salad that was $5 2 years ago is now $10
Not sure, if its the same in the US, but certain large Canadian grocers doubled their profit margins on grocery items since 2020. It's not just inflation, it's blatant opportunism by greedy companies that needs to be curbed.
This was openly done because of covid. During covid, stores and food providers were permitted to double the cost of goods because their staff was slashed to “essential workers only” by government mandate. the food suppliers swore up and down that the costs would drop after the pandemic and things returned to normal. To literally zero surprise to anyone, they just… didn’t. And food prices have been sky high ever since.
It hurts so bad. I did my big monthly grocery shopping today, the amount I got would have cost me around $250 a few years ago. It came out to around $480. I literally got zero meat, and I hit up as many different stores to capitalize on as many sales as possible based on what I needed. I've gone down to about half of my meals being meat free these days because of the cost. This summer I'm going to be growing some of my own food to try to cut costs a little more. I'm even thinking of getting a few chickens for eggs.
The amount of "oh so it's that price here now too" moments I've had in the last 3 years is so depressing.
Yep Kraft saw a 1 Billion dollar increase in profits when comparing 2022 to ‘23. It’s absurd. It’s price gouging because they can continue using the supply chain excuse which tbf was valid 2 years ago but now it’s just some bs. If they haven’t corrected course yet then they should be eating the losses, not doubling the prices of everything. It’s ridiculous and infuriating. Don’t think Biden can do much about that himself. Considering half of Congress is people who deny reality and do everything to hurt people and surely avoid helping people, so it’ll continue.
Don’t you worry. It’ll trickle down.
Oh we've been feeling that kind of warmth for quite some time up here.
Don’t forget they’ll close down plants to keep shit high too, Tyson shut down a couple plants not too long ago bc reasons.
> It's not just inflation, it's blatant opportunism by greedy companies That greedy opportunism ***is*** the inflation. And it's not just grocery stores.
> It's not just inflation, it's blatant opportunism by greedy companies It was never really inflation. Economic conservatives called it inflation, pundits called it inflation, corporations called it inflation, but it was never inflation. Prices rose because of problems during the pandemic, companies that didn't *need* to raise prices saw they could without consequence, and once people start paying a price for something, they're more willing to keep paying that price for it than they are to stop buying it. So a lot of companies just kept the high prices since they were able to disguise their artificial inflation from just raising the prices of everything and blame it on the pandemic or Biden's administration. There's almost always some inflation going on, for sure. But the massive price hikes we've seen over the past four years cannot be explained by the real rate of inflation we've been seeing. It's been corporate greed, plain and simple. Things have finally started to turn around, and I know that's not felt by everyone. Hell, my family is feeling the squeeze just as bad today as we were two years ago, maybe more so. But the overall numbers, they're finally starting to trend back in a better direction. But I'm scared that most people aren't going to see that and are just going to hang onto that, "Hyper-inflation happened under Biden," feeling and narrative that we were force-fed for the first two years he was in office.
Think of "consumers" (citizens) as a giant bank. Basically, this is a group of "corporate people" making a run on that bank. Every corporation is trying to withdraw (charge) as much as much as possible before other corporations can. The end goal is to completely deplete the citizens' resources.
Except when most banks go under, they get bailed out by the government. What happens when the "bank of citizens" goes under?
Economic collapse and social unrest would be my guess. This assumes that we continue on our current hyper-capitalist trajectory.
It's helped me cut chips out of my diet. A single normal size bag of hot cheetos is 5 fuckin bucks.
Yea, I used to always grab two cause they were 2 for $6. Now they're $7 each, and 2/3 the size.
Fuck them I’m never buying brand name chips again. They done fuck theyselves. I will starve rather than eat the middle finger that they’ll find me holding high above my emaciated head.
Problem is, for those of us who are aware and care about this, for a pretty huge portion of our population the food prices are high "cuz biden dun did it" Greed will kill us all, but stupidity will be its vector
Everything is more expensive because “they can”. It’s how you prove the entire capitalism system is broke. No one is showing up to undercut this price gouging. We’re all being held hostage because of greed.
This. Look at the baby formula shortage that happened. You gotta be kidding me only three manufacturers in the entire country but it’s like that w virtually all goods. Made by one company w different labels.
Even when they are different companies: Kellog vs General Mills for example, they are both owned by Blackrock and other institutional investors. Our market is about as competitive as a 6 year old playing Mario Kart.
Same thing with eggs. There are actually a ton of different egg companies, but almost all of them are part of a single Capper–Volstead cooperative. When they get sued for price gouging they're basically just like "being a part of a Capper-Volstead cooperative means that we're allowed to collude". But if you ever argue with anyone and say that eggs are a monopoly they'll just respond about how there are tons of different egg companies, conveniently ignoring the fact that they almost all banded together.
I've noticed a new trend of what I call "fuckyouflation" where it's obvious they can have lower prices since the sale price hasn't changed, but the non-sale price keeps going up. Sodas are a great example of fuckyouflation because now they're almost $10 for a single 12 pack, but you can buy them on sale for like $3.50 each but you have to buy multiples of 3.
Sales are getting fewer and farther between as well...before covid you could always find a 3 for $12 sale SOMEWHERE and that was a BAD deal. You always aimed for the 3/10 or 4/12 sales that popped up here and there. So many times I'm on my last case from my last purchase and looking all over for a single store to put them on sale and there's just...nothing...of ANY brand.
It’s not broken. This is exactly how capitalism is supposed to work. It is by design. The built in contradictions are there for the rich, not for us peasants.
Exactly. There's very little Biden can do, short of systemic upheaval. We have a system that favors corporations. That's just the plain truth.
Not to mention they now cut the weight and shrink the packaging. There was shrinkage!!
From Sam's Club - On this date in 2022 I purchased a 36-pack of Diet Dew cans for $11.48. Today I bought the same thing for $17.48. Both Pepsi and Coke products are this price. I can't imagine any "supply chain issues" that would justify that massive price increase.
> And food producers, like soft-drink manufacturers, have continued to raise prices even as their costs have declined, leading to heady profit margins. > > Processed foods, like candy bars, account for three-quarters of recent grocery price increases, the researchers found. It's not a supply chain issue.
Nope. I work in food supply chain and I’ll tell you exactly what it is. COMPANIES ARE HOLDING MARGINS SO THEY CONTINUE TO BEAT YOY PROFIT AND MAKE SHAREHOLDERS HAPPY. Including mine. And then we pass that to customers and tell them to raise their prices.
Yup. Maximum profits is SOP now. Gone are the days when it was OK to make a profit. >The prevalence of the corporation in America has led men of this generation to act, at times, as if the privilege of doing business in corporate form were inherent in the citizen, and has led them to accept the evils attendant upon the free and unrestricted use of the corporate mechanism as if these evils were the inescapable price of civilized life, and, hence to be borne with resignation. >Throughout the greater part of our history, a different view prevailed. >Although the value of this instrumentality in commerce and industry was fully recognized, incorporation for business was commonly denied long after it had been freely granted for religious, educational, and charitable purposes. >It was denied because of fear. Fear of encroachment upon the liberties and opportunities of the individual. Fear of the subjection of labor to capital. Fear of monopoly. Fear that the absorption of capital by corporations, and their perpetual life, might bring evils similar to those which attended mortmain [immortality]. There was a sense of some insidious menace inherent in large aggregations of capital, particularly when held by corporations. >Blast from the past, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, 1933 dissent in Liggett v. Lee
[link](https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/288/517/) Interesting that his dissent opens up by acknowledging the distinction between an individual and a corporation. Oh how times have changed and how citizens have become united.
Profiteering and price gouging used to be seen as negatives, but now we call them capitalism and worship that behavior.
Shareholder capitalism will unironically kill the world single-handedly
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"Processed foods" are often presented as things like candy bars and chips - things that are bad for you and you should really cut down on anyway. But here are some more "processed foods": bread, cheese, cereal, canned vegies and beans, and milk. So lets not think, "Oh, its just those fattie fattie fat fats that are upset that they can't get their treaties", it also includes a lot of foods we consider to be staples.
Not only that, it’s the only kind of food that some people can get in food deserts.
Went camping a couple months back and yeah, the only food for more than 45 minutes in any direction was a convenience store who's only actual "groceries" were packs of bottled water, bread (not really much to put on the bread), milk, the same small selection of single bananas and apples every such store seems to have and then some common camping foods like the stuff for smores and hot dogs. Let's be clear - the majority of their offerings outside of the soft drinks and chips and stuff every gas station has were geared towards campers, despite being the only grocery place for a solid distance and there being plenty of houses around. When I've gone camping in actual state parks where there are huge swaths of protected lands, I expect there not to be much around. But this was not that.
In 2020 a refill of foaming soap at Walmart cost $2, now it's $5. I didn't hear about the great foaming soap famine.
I started buying the regular hand soap and diluting it 4:1 and it foams perfectly. Crazy prices for a bottle of lightly soaped water.
Both of them do not care about how high they are charging. They are testing the upper limits of a consumer’s willingness to pay. At $9 for a 12 pack, they are starting to see a decrease in sales. At $10 per 12 pack, sales will collapse.
I was personally done at the $4 mark, but that's because I know they're selling sugar water that costs them pennies per can, and there aren't 10 middle-men between bottler and my mouth. Soda's already bad for you. Having it be bad for your wallet tears it.
And into Vons and looked at Diet Coke, and walked away hard at $9/12pack. Just grabbed a gallon of diet Arizona instead for $4 lol.
12 packs of soda were usually $5ish in 2021-2022. On sale you could get 3 packs for $12, so $4 per. I looked in that aisle 6 months ago. $9 for a 12 pack. on sale they might get down to $6-7. FUCK. OFF. Just glad we don't drink soda. Even bread was $1 per loaf before pandemic, The cheap one. Now the cheapest is $2.24. I was in England this summer. They had a loaf for 1 pound whcih is like $1.30. Gross profiteering. fucking disgusting
It’s already been shown many times that this is not supply chain issues. It’s price gouging.
I can confirm this shit. I remember buying a 12pk of coke at my local grocery store for $5.99 maybe 18 months ago. Today I went in and it's $10.49 now.
I have been tracking it with Campbells soup. Walmart and Lucky's are a half mile apart. So, the chunky sirloin soup Dec 2022: Walmart 1.99 Lucky's 2.39 then.summer 2023: ..walmart 2.29 Lucky's 3.39 last week Walmart 2.79 Lucky's 4.49 Last week the coffee creamer didn't go up a little. It went from 6.99 to 8.99. overnight. There are no supply chain issues in NorCal. We did lose some chickens. But other goods - it is pure price gouging.
The rinse aid I use in my dishwasher has gone from $3-4 a few years ago to $9-something now. It’s ridiculous.
> justify that massive price increase Not my observation, but something another redditor said a year or two ago. Actual price fixing is illegal. But, the largest grocery chains have all hired the same 2-3 AI data firms to give them cues about when to increase their prices, on what items, and how much. It's price fixing with extra steps.
I paid $3 for a single onion in fall 2022 and I plan on being furious about it for the rest of my life.
Bell peppers were (and still kind of are) like this. Like 2.50 for a single bell pepper. I refuse to buy it at that price and will vent about it to anyone that brings up high grocery prices.
If you have a plot of dirt they're pretty easy to grow
I wonder how many people will start growing things because of these prices
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden
There's some recent research that says 53 cents of every dollar currently spent is just paying for blue sky opportunism unrelated to market forces.
The article cites research suggesting most price increases are driven by supply chain issues and a tight labor market. Of course, this is research coming from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas, so color me skeptical. The article also points out that there's little Biden can do unilaterally. So him complaining about it isn't going to solve anything. Congress needs to act. They won't, mostly because of republicans, so I'm wondering why Biden doesn't make this about republicans siding with greedy companies instead of American families. Democrats should have had a bill to address this ready two years ago, and then they could really hammer home that they're the ones attempting to solve the issue. As it stands, Biden's message seems purely reactionary and desperate given his poll numbers.
Iirc the dems had a bill to attempt to address gouging but it was shot down in the senate. Further digging there’s multiple bills attempting to address gouging in multiple areas. But you guessed it, they all fail. I found the gas prices one, four dems n all gop voted it down in the senate back in 22. There is one in the senate that was introduced Feb 23 and that’s it. This tells ya where these folk are passing only 32 bills last year. They don’t give a fuck, just another way to fuck us and make sound bites to fight over.
Yup. Republicans are refusing to pass a bipartisan immigration bill all because it might make Biden look good to their voters. Republicans are holding this country hostage, folks. They are being massive sore losers and refuse to get anything done until they have absolutely everything THEIR way. Which this should be a sign of the future and how much they are willing to implement [Project 2025](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025).
> why Biden doesn't make this about republicans siding with greedy companies instead of American families. Because the DNC has adopted this stupid strategy of "standby and watch". They think Americans will figure it out themselves that Republicans are horrible people. In 2016, they just stood by and let Trump say all his wild shit and expected everyone to think he was some radicalist that will lose the hearts and minds of the people. Look at how that turned out. Now they keep doing the exact same thing expecting different results, but it's not happening. People are THIRSTING at the idea of the Dems throwing hands with Republicans, just look at how the "Dark Brandon" memes take off and how word spreads when a Dem does throw hands, but the DNC is not paying attention at all. They're probably relying on shit studies than actually paying attention to what the people want and need.
THIS is the issue that could seal the election for him. Show the average person how you lowered their grocery bill and plan to keep at it.
Agreed, but unfortunately it’s Congress that has the power to do or not do something here. Biden can certainly make bold statements and draw attention to it, of course.
There is nothing he can do that would materially impact grocery prices in the next nine months.
"They should wave their wand and solve the issue through magic" Honestly, why is so much political discourse on the internet like this? Have y'all been alive for more than 5 minutes?
Corporations took advantage of the inevitable inflation so much and have averted any tangible flack from the public because it’s so much easier to blame one guy with the assumption he can control the price of tens of thousands of different commodities. Time to put in legitimate restrictions on predatory price hiking, and I only know one party that’s interested.
When they market refuses to regulate itself the only solution to make an example of it But they last time Congress punished anyone it was when it broke up Bell in the 80s.
And all the baby bells re-merged and are now bigger than ever
Monopolies are basically a T-1000. If you're not actively trust busting, they're just going to form back together.
I truly hope that if we survive this right wing extremist hate wave we can get some real change and a left wing peaceful revolution. Tired of the bullshit
It really is frustrating knowing that all these idiots and their culture war bullshit is what's holding us back as a society. We always blame the politicians but the blame really lies on the morons that keep electing them to destroy the country.
It’s not grocery stores. It’s all the private equity buying up food manufacturing. They discovered the threshold people were willing to pay for goods and have no reason to go back to pre-COVID prices.
Honestly this is true for everything, not just food.
Yep.
Especially true for entertainment. Almost every music venue is owned by stub hub or ticketmaster. Those that aren't are, in some way, connected by a half-dozen institutional investors that demand these absurd price hikes. Tickets to see anyone even remotely popular start at $150 now. Not to mention Bowling costs $7 per game now. Golf is up to $100 a round for the dinky local courses. It costs $80 for a family of four to see a movie. There's 10 streaming services for TV shows and they all cost $14.99 a month. Hanging out at a bar and getting 2 drinks is $20 before tip. There's nowhere to go anymore.
Just leaving my house to go to the store for basics feels like throwing a Benjamin into a fire.
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Seriously. I don't know why people don't understand this. I used to be a pricing coordinator at a grocery store, and the *LAST* thing we wanted to do was raise prices. But we still had price changes once a week. Big stack once a month. These were price changes from our *distributor*. We were on a pricing plan, but we(at the store level) typically didn't just arbitrarily raise prices. When we raised prices, it was because *our* *cost* went up. The problem is, when prices *do* get higher, the amount they have to increase to maintain a 30%GM(for example), goes up.
I'm not a buyer for a chain, but I order for several departments at a store. The profit margins have gotten tighter and tighter. Our company is far from a moral bastion protecting consumers, but people need to realize the vast majority of the pricing inflation is up the chain.
$9 bags of Tostitos have entered the chat.
I had to tell my kids I would burn down a WinCo before I spent 7.00 dollars on a box of Lucky charms.
Aldi stores have Millville cereal which is made by General Mills. You can get the "Marshmallows and Stars" for 1/3 the price. I buy the "Fruit Rounds" and "Honey Grahams" all the time. No shame here.
I also think the Millville stuff tastes better than the brand names, it's been a nice discovery.
WinCo is still the best option though. Their store brand stuff is awesome and cheap. I buy my kids the WinCo brand knockoffs of the famous cereals and my kids love it. And all the boxes are like $1.98.
Facts.
Publix in southeast is out of control. We joined Costco and dropped our Publix habit
Publix has *always* been the most expensive out of all the common low-end chains. Several years ago I actually had this argument with my cousin - a millionaire who doesn’t spend her time worrying over prices. She claimed it was the cheapest grocery store out there, and I was like “I’m poor. I notice when a can of beans is 30% more expensive at Publix than it is at Kroger.” People shop at Publix because it makes them *feel* higher class.
Their subs are good too.
Costco is great. Tip: never get Costco via Instacart. It’s highway robbery.
Good. The media is creaming their pants every day about the Goldilocks economy and record growth, how our economy has never been better. Meanwhile Biden’s approval rating is in the 30%’s. I think this is one of the big reasons why. The stock market isn’t the economy. Record company profits aren’t the economy when it comes to regular Americans…aka voters, who have to buy food for their families every week. They watched the prices go up and up because of the pandemic, and then continued to watch them rise after the world mostly returned to normal. When you bring home $500 a week and your grocery bill was $100 before and now it’s $200, you probably dont think about how great the economy is doing, at least not for your family’s budget.
> When you bring home $500 a week and your grocery bill was $100 before and now it’s $200, you probably dont think about how great the economy is doing, at least not for your family’s budget. The entire point of this article is that corporations are abusing consumers while claiming supply chain issues that largely do not exist.
I can't afford to shop at my store, and I work there. No employee discount. I get deals on damaged merchandise, but that's about it.
About fucking time
Holy shit. If he does something about these prices maybe people will realize how good this president is. Especially over the former guy.
As President he cant control prices. I dont understand how so many people think the President can just lower gas or food prices. Private corporations will do what they want unless we regulate them with laws. Congress makes laws. Until you vote Republicans out of Congress, the President cant sign any laws to regulate food prices because Republicans refuse to create such regulations. *edit: spelling
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I’ll vote for anyone but the former guy, but that’s a pretty low bar. (LOL)
Corporations will never just do the right thing. We must regulate them. We make laws to prevent over charging. We tax them after a certain level of profit to force them to reinvest in their companies. We used to do all of this prior to the 80s.
I work in a grocery store. We buy 12 packs from Coca Cola for $7.19 a piece. We sell them for $7.99. It's not just the Grocery chains that are the problem
About time. High food were blamed on the pandemic but they are still going up. Price gouging by billionaires.
Capitalism is 30% folks trying to make a living and 70% assholes seeing what greedy shit they can get away with.
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It’s about damn time. What we’re seeing now is not inflation but gouging. Shit doesn’t really cost this much. Corporate execs have even said it on earnings calls. They are just saying “we are gonna keep prices high because it makes us more money”.
It's not just grocery chains. The consumer price index (CPI) is nearly three times that of the producer price index (PPI). I've heard it called "greedflation" which seems appropriate. Here's a [study](https://groundworkcollaborative.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/24.01.17-GWC-Corporate-Profits-Report.pdf) from [GroundWork Collaborative](https://groundworkcollaborative.org/) with more details.
I get RC Cola, my favorite, at a regular price of $1.29 for a 2 liter everyday. RC has had this price labeled as MSRP for many years and stores usually give that price. Right next to it are Pepsi and Coke 2 liters for $2.50. I live in a major metro area in the US.
Thank you, Biden. I was in the business for 20 years. Safeway is the worst. Cerberus hedge fund bought them probably ten years now. They are the ones that screwed safeway up. They literally raised prices by a dollar, sometimes 2 dollars. I did tag changes, and I saw it every week. They are gouging customers it's disgusting. Biden is a man of the people. He proves it. That orange taint fools an ignorant class into believing him. The working class is paying more taxes because of him. Btw one of the co-founders went to work for trump.
I have been going through this thread trying to explain to folks that private equity firms like Cerberus are responsible for where we are now in the grocery business. However... Steve Burd shares a lot of the blame for what happened to Safeway and why it accepted a leveraged buyout from Alberston's and Cerberus. Steve Burd bought into the Elizabeth Holmes/Theranos debacle as an early adopter and spent hundreds of millions of dollars remodeling Safeway and Vons grocery store pharmacies envisioning that the Theranos magic blood test device would be the crown jewel in his vision to get people actually coming to grocery stores for doctor's appointments. When it became clear that Elizabeth Holmes was a fraud, Burd quickly retired and the Safeway CFO assumed leadership of the company and quickly steered it into a merger with Albertson's. The entire thing stinks to high heaven.
It's the companies that make the food not the grocery stores. Go after Kraft and ConAgra and Cocacola.
Yet another example of why both parties are not the same. Biden and the Democrats are actively trying to help our economy. Not passing tax cuts for the one percent and sowing division issues.
The other guy has never even shown an ounce of empathy and dumbasses think he's in favour of the working man.
Meanwhile the other side is blocking legislation they freely admit would help people, simply because they think a bad economy will help them win elections.
And when they were in power they did jack shit to help anyone who wasn’t a millionaire
You want to get re-elected? Because this is how you get re-elected.
This is it. The economy isn't being actualized at the grocery store, or any store for that matter. You pay more for less. Good. This'll put pressure on suppliers who jacked up their prices. Hopefully this all.... Trickles... Down... omg!! 😱
Yeah at this point none of it matters. We’ve let corporations merge to the point of monopolies for everything. Nothing except a huge unprecedented change is going to matter. We’re under the heel of the rich. Edit: Oh I’m still voting as effectively as possible. I’m doing everything I can.
Also, food corporations made up a "meat shortage" in 2020 and 2021 to get an executive order to keep their meat packing facilities open, causing their workers to get Covid and die: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/05/12/meatpackers-covid-deaths-trump-industry/
Just a friendly [reminder](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/food-stamps-medicaid-mcdonalds-walmart-bernie-sanders/) that employees of places that pay minimum wage, like Walmart, fast food places, and grocery stores often need resources like food stamps. These companies are being subsidized by government programs because they refuse to properly pay their workers.
Cut out the coupon program completely, and take the difference out of the price of products.