I'm about as left wing as they come, but I really don't understand why anybody would blame anybody for getting the best price they could...on anything.
If you really think that greed is the cause of inflation--well be the change you want to see :-) Just go in and tell your employer you want to reduce your salary by 10% because you think inflation is getting too high.
> Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics[:] "There genuinely was an increase in costs, but then there was this extra margin on top. So the question is, how on earth did [retailers] manage to get away with that? That to me is the big issue."
Competition should temper this more than it did, but didn’t.
My money’s on “incredibly high levels of concentration of ownership in both food production and food retail”. A stupid fraction of the stuff on shelves is made by a handful of companies. We used to just assume this kind of thing was bad and break those kinds of things up well before they hit this level of concentration, but stopped doing that in the ‘70s, and here we are, with most industries dominated by a tiny number of players, including food.
Here is the Abstract
CHAPTER 5 The Monopoly Enigma, the Reagan Administration's Antitrust Experiment, and the Global Economy from the book: Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, Culture
"In the 1980s, the Reagan Administration drastically altered American antitrust policy, virtually eliminating Section 2 cases involving monopolies. This chapter provides a context for that decision by tracing the efforts that the federal government made since 1890 to reconcile an opposition to highly concentrated economic power with the even stronger enthusiasm Americans have always had for the economic success they associated with the nation's largest enterprises. In this setting, judges and government lawyers struggled over the years to come up with a clear concept of monopoly. In the global economy of the late 20th century, the Reagan policy innovation solved that problem and proved to be timely and significant. The new policy allowed American firms to get up to global scale, either through strategic alliances or through mergers that would not have been allowed under previous administrations"
Yeah I'd be willing to bet that if you were to go into a given aisle at a "typical" american grocery store and were to tally up all the companies that own the brands in that aisle, you comfortably end up with under 20 companies, in some cases less than 10 (excluding the beer/wine aisle).
It's honestly embarrassing how concentrated ownership of food has become.
There's a difference between people working to survive fighting for every dollar versus the CEOs who make millions because they can pump the stock price by squeezing every penny out of consumers.
How do you prevent that without throwing away all semblance of free markets?
I also would rather not see CEOs making such massive paychecks, but if that's what the market is willing to pay them I don't see a clear way to stop it.
We do not have true free market in the US. When all grocery stores jack up prices, what choice do people have? Eat cereal for every meal (an actual CEO quote).
Totally agree there. To me that's a problem, but I know for many they see that as a good thing.
> When all grocery stores jack up prices, what choice do people have?
A rather surprising fact about food, it doesn't just come from grocery stores. Farmers markets, gardening, hunting, raising chickens, etc are absolutely options.
Almost all of human history was devoid of grocery stores entirely. Local markets are a different story, but then you are often dealing with people from your community and not massive corporations that don't know who you are and only care about profit.
We may just live in very different places. When I lived in Seattle farmers market prices were crazy. Living in a different part of the country and in a part of town closer to farmers, our prices are much better. We also use a local CSA, $20 per week for a decent amount of whatever is in season.
I also have a pretty large garden, we don't spend all that much time on it. We don't plant as intensively as most people think about. We don't till and keep the dirt bare, its more of a food forest at this point but we do still plant annual produce in rows in some areas. We spend maybe 3 hours per week total in the garden during the summer.
Raising livestock doesn't mean your life has to revolve around them, its all up to how you choose to raise them and what you raise.
> In all cases the economies of scale in industrial farming trumps local operations.
Have you ever been to an industrial farm, feed lot, chicken house, or slaughterhouse? If not I'd hold judgement on the value of that scale until you see how the animals are actually raised and treated. I'd extend that to crop fields as well, though its harder to empathize with what a plant when they're so different from us.
In totality, we have choices. But that does not account for individual circumstances, and ignores the way that work life in the US has shaped people's lives. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to raise chickens, hunt for food, spend their time and money at farmer's markets, etc. Capitalism in America is very much designed to keep people from having time or money or ability to actually change their circumstances.
What you're describing is effectively a form of slavery.
I very much agree with how you describe our system. Though I would see that as the fundamental problem to fix, something like grocery stores acting like greedy corporations is a tiny, distracting problem when its part of a system that has hints of slavery.
People wouldn't bother making more than $10M if the tax jumped to 100%.
You could take every dollar from the most obscenely rich in the US and you could only afford to find the US government for 6 months. We simply spend too much to fix it by taxing the rich to death.
Basically they would do the value creating activities of worth because even the most worthy and valuable value creating activities now cost less than 10M. The exchanges of value over 10M to an individuals can most apply be characterized as the individual looting society for their profit.
I don’t know… I would definitely blame companies that raise prices on life saving products like insulin just because they can. You should at least be willing to own the blame if you are ready to take advantage of regulatory and legal restrictions just so you can get the best price for products that are important to society. Like, come on… at least take the blame for being a crappy and greedy company.
People are often charitable, but companies being charitable by setting their prices low for the benifit of consumers (vs driving competitors out of business, or getting people hooked on their product with promotional rates, or other schemes designed to get them more money in the long run)? Companies weren't routinely and systematically leaving money on the table until a few years ago.
Oh, sorry, don't get me wrong - I'm generally with you. One will seek their best deal.
I, however, differ in the sense RE: change. I think companies more viciously seek profits to appease shareholders. There is such a thing as 'too optimal'
It is about power and inequality, and the system-wide outcomes overall of such moves. We are seeing massive consolidation of wealth at the top. Relaxed attitudes like yours won't slow this down.
Most of the policies I've seen proposed lately have a very Marxist or communist feel to them. Personally I'm not willing to go down that road as a solution, though I'd love solutions that don't go to such extremes.
Communism would be dispossessing all the farmers and store of everything they have, assigning workers to these industries and deciding what they should plant, package, and provide and how the wares ought to be distributed to society.
It doesn't help discussion to mislabel every form of government intervention as communism.
It frames things every functional government does as somehow a slippery slide towards the USSR.
For the same reason we never allow anybody to get the best possible result out of the market with no restrictions. Many businesses simply have more power than individuals (customers and employees), in various cases both concrete and subjective. There's just no way to solve all behavior through regulation, though.
In this case, the umbrella complaint is that people perceive businesses to have used their power, in various ways simultaneously during both long-term and short-term declines (and sometimes, in the worst cases, just because they can), to suffer less than individuals in relative terms. People obviously dislike this (if it's true).
Maybe this specific look at grocers is or is not a good example - but regardless, you've spoken broadly, and I frankly find it a little hard to believe that you literally "don't understand".
Getting the best price they can would be fair in a competitive marketplace. But when consolidation leads to fewer competitors, more monopoly, then the constraint of fair competition has been removed. The stores are free to raise prices and consumers have nowhere else to go.
Americans don't follow the same left/right divide that much of Europe does.
For us left means "liberal", though with again a different definition that isn't rooted in liberty, or " progressive", which is a horribly confusing term that seems to imply you believe incremental change is always the best approach.
Right here means "conservative", though again the definition there has gotten confusing over my lifetime.
I think its a fair argument, though, that because we have been capitalist from the beginning and don't have any history with communism in our system, the traditional left/right split is less helpful here.
It is when examined closely, but we have a corrupted form of capitalism and any "ism" is inherently viewed as bad because of how it's taught in the American education system.
If you really think that greed is the cause of inflation--well be the change you want to see :-) Just go in and tell your employer you want to reduce your salary by 10% because you think inflation is getting too high.