Notice how many of those things have highly inelastic supply, are monopolies (or close), or have really bloated "value adding" supply chains.
NIMBYs and such ensure that more housing can't be built, at scale, in areas with high rents, to have normal supply/demand dynamic.
Food is relatively cheap, if you cook for yourself and don't mind a lot of beans, rice, bread-machine bread, peanut butter, etc. If you want heavily processed or prepared food, or restaurant food...that's an order of magnitude more expensive. And many parts of the food industry are far too consolidated to be competitive.
Etc.
Taxing the hell out of profits sounds great...but in sectors where the real problems are strangulated supply, monopolies, and massive processing in the supply chain - it won't do much good.
> Food is relatively cheap, if you cook for yourself and don't mind a lot of beans, rice, bread-machine bread, peanut butter, etc. If you want heavily processed or prepared food, or restaurant food...that's an order of magnitude more expensive. And many parts of the food industry are far too consolidated to be competitive.
The people already doing so are absolutely fucked.
While potentially still cheaper, those basic staples have typically seen a disproportionately large rise in their price. The price of porridge oats and milk increased by over 30% in the UK between 2022-2023[0]. Own brand plain dried pasta went up by 41% in one, relatively cheap, supermarket[1].
CPI as a whole is at 8.9% but food is at 19.2%[2].
That's not even accounting for the noticeable inflation in the price of the cheapest goods that occurred prior or energy bills more than quadrupling between 2019 and 2023, even before Ukraine they had nearly doubled.
The argument that undermines the price gouging theory is that consumer demand for optional Goods remains High and is also inflating. This indicates that consumers are not responding to higher prices by decreasing demand.
I wasn't arguing the merits of price gouging, rather that as opposed to what CPI figures may suggest, the poorest have been hit much harder, by much higher inflation than those better off.
Seeing as we're now on the topic. Demand may be high where you are but that certainly doesn't hold true in the UK. The statistics show clearly that people are buying less[0] and getting less for it.
Retail volume is down 3.1% on 2022 across the board, there's literally a chart titled "Divergence between retail sales volumes and values"[1] showing how severely people are being squeezed. Figure 4[2] breaks out the same data for food retail specifically.
While certain demographics have been able to somewhat keep up with rising prices, the reality is that some food banks are having to distribute 50% more than they did pre-pandemic[3]. Real disposable income is already well below 2020 levels and expected to erase a decade of "growth" as it nosedives towards that of 2013[4].
Prepared food is really unconsolidated like bulk food unless you live in a total roadside mall hellscape. There seems to be agreements on maintaining irrational pricing where there is price differentiation. I.e. you will pay more for cheaper to make vegan food because a vegan can't eat a cheap burger. IMO this is more distributed in nature like landlords sharing a price fixing app.
Disagree. There is a very old rule of thumb in the restaurant biz, that your selling price has to be 4x your actual cost of the food - because of all the labor, kitchen equipment, rent, etc. overhead. I'd bet that similar rules of thumb apply to grocery stores' deli departments, shrink-wrapped sandwiches in vending machines, and pretty much every other sort of non-restaurant prepared food.
And, at least in the area I live in, the barriers to entry for the restaurant biz are pretty minimal. Most restaurants are (at most) local micro-chains, and there's a lot of churn as people try to make a restaurant work...and often fail financially. Want to get into the restaurant biz? With a low-6-figure nest egg, and willingness to wait for some local commercial landlord to have a vacant failed little restaurant on his hands, it's "easy". And the real estate supply is pretty elastic - cities and NIMBYs favor the (often quick & easy) construction of more small retail spaces; likewise converting generic vacant retail spaces into more restaurants.
Vs. if you want to be residential landlord - I'll guess a 7-figure nest egg to buy existing property (limited supply, and buying some does not increase overall supply). If you want to actually expand supply, by building rental housing at scale...you'd better have an 8-figure nest egg, and experienced legal team, and be willing to spend 8+ years (from "ready to do this" to "collect rent checks") fighting your way through the government red tape, NIMBY-land's standing army, and actual construction. With no guarantees of success.
NIMBYs and such ensure that more housing can't be built, at scale, in areas with high rents, to have normal supply/demand dynamic.
Food is relatively cheap, if you cook for yourself and don't mind a lot of beans, rice, bread-machine bread, peanut butter, etc. If you want heavily processed or prepared food, or restaurant food...that's an order of magnitude more expensive. And many parts of the food industry are far too consolidated to be competitive.
Etc.
Taxing the hell out of profits sounds great...but in sectors where the real problems are strangulated supply, monopolies, and massive processing in the supply chain - it won't do much good.