Groceries 2024

[raisingarizona13]

As a working guy with very little disposable income buying groceries has been crushing us. It's seriously bullshit.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/errolschweizer/2024/02/07/why-your-groceries-are-still-so-expensive/

[J. Barron DeJong]

https://x.com/statisticurban/status/1839525383760155044?s=46&t=3lUaICPxsR_NcRK2VkCfkg

[Cisco Kid]

50/50 mix of tuna and cat food is palatable after a while.

[byates1]

Start stealing

[AmmergauerTele]

Pretty sure my salary hasn’t gone up 30+% under Biden Harris. Grocery visits for a family of four were in the low to mid $200s, now over $400. 30% my ass. My wife teaches 4th grade and got 2% this year. Not even close with keeping up with inflation. I do fondly remember refinancing at 2.25%, 2% inflation, blah, blah, blah….. I’ll be ok…..it’s my kids who are screwed.

[Buster Highmen]

Blame Biden/Harris for corporate gouging when the right wants less regulations.
Polly my ass.

From above link:
This is pressure from suppliers to increase prices. How? Professor Isabella Weber explains “that supply shocks allowed corporations to tacitly collude, hike prices, and rake in record profits…This is a form of implicit collusion,” she said. “Firms do not even need to talk to one another to know that a cost shock is a great time to raise prices.”

Alex Turnbull, a commodities analyst, echoes this, “When you go from 15 to 10 companies, not much changes. When you go from 10 to 6, a lot changes. But when you go from 6 to 4 – it’s a fix.”

And the record profits Professor Weber mentions? Groundwork Collaborative recently found that corporate profits accounted for 53% of 2023 inflation. EPI likewise concluded that over 51% of the drastically higher inflationary pressures of 2020 and 2021 were also direct results of profits. The Kansas City Federal Reserve even pegged this around 40%, indicating that sellers’ inflation is now a pretty mainstream idea.


Corporate profits as a share of the national income are at historic highs, while workers’ share is lower than before the pandemic. And labor shortages get a lot of media attention. Retail labor costs increased as food workers demanded better pay and benefits after getting stressed out, sick and even dying at work during the pandemic. But even if retail labor costs went up 50% across the board, this would result in price increases of just 5-10% at grocery stores, hardly justifying the price hikes in steaks, yogurt or hash browns.

[nickwm21]

Covid constrained supply on certain items while “most” kept their employment and income. It created an economy where some producers increased prices due to constraints and weren’t punished in sales - so all businesses increased prices whether there was an impact or not.

If you think who was in the white house had an effect on prices, you’re a fucking idiot.


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[old goat]

FTC is looking at food prices. Who knows if anything will come of it but FTC under Lina Khan and Biden has been more aggressive than it has been for decades--and taken immense shit for it. I hope Khan stays on.

[Bunion 2020]

Hmmm let's see. An article from 8 months ago?

Are prices still high? Yes.

Is it a political party or figures fault? No.

Can the President or Congress do much about high prices? History tends to say, no, not really.

[AmmergauerTele]

I generally prescribe to the free market will dictate prices. Wish I still lived in NH with Market Basket! Was it Albertson's or Kroger that swallowed up a ton of stores, can't remember.

[jono]

If we're prescribing markets we should probably define what we mean by "free," but I'll assume you mean purely competitive and not just whatever market happens to exist, since it's purely competitive markets that are known for efficiently setting prices.

As consolidation reduces competition the market becomes dramatically less free, ultimately a monopoly allows a single producer to set prices unilaterally. There's a whole study on how to maximize profits under that condition, and of course it's quite different from a competitive market.

We've had some pretty free markets but we used to defend them. They're only just now getting around to taking on Ticketbastard for anticompetitive practices. Let that sink in.

[Mazderati]

Are greedy companies to blame for grocery inflation? We looked at the data. 3-minute listen: https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1...e-greedflation

FTC is looking at food prices. Who knows if anything will come of it but FTC under Lina Khan and Biden has been more aggressive than it has been for decades--and taken immense shit for it. I hope Khan stays on.

There are indications the current admin is not particularly fond of Khan, but her profile has grown such that removing her might be unpopular intraparty. Also hoping she remains in place.

[AmmergauerTele]

Regardless of how we got here I feel bad for folks. Am I going to be OK, yeah sure, and I feel lucky. There are lots of folks that it is really getting tight, and I feel for them!

[Mazderati]

Yes, to that and OP's point, it is a tangible increase regardless of reason.


Add grocery taxes to your list of voting issues if you are in a state that implements them. Shit should be illegal.

https://www.aarp.org/money/taxes/info-2024/states-that-tax-groceries.html

[Thaleia]

Same deal here in Canada, prices are nuts. Things like chicken breast or many cheeses are basically luxury items at his point.