No really, why are groceries so expensive now?
No really, why are groceries so expensive now?
A Q&A with an economist about skyrocketing food prices…
dog food is about double what it was in 2020. Say what you will about the cost of energy going up during that time: there's no way to blame ONLY energy costs for that.
It's greed.
100% agree, businesses will charge as much as they can get away with
I heard somewhere private equity firms are coming for our pets already, buying up tons of local and regional pet hospitals, dog and pet food suppliers, etc. Basically they know kids are increasingly unaffordable and so they need to capitalize on the fact more millennials are staying childless and treating their pet as their child.
That happened a decade ago. You can't find many pet supplies anywhere anymore because one company owns the distributors and the stores -- and they don't give a shit because they're American and Canada is too small of a market to support, so it's left to wither and die.
The same with Veterinary services. They've all be bought up, made into chains, or signed bullshit distribution or service agreements by a single (American) company and now it costs many multiples what it used to for no reason except greed.
In Canada I assume the vast majority of the increase goes to corporate profits because that's what our economy seems designed to maximise, but it's also worth noting that world food prices are back up to levels not seen since the 1970s: https://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/foodpricesindex/en/
Where does that extra money that we now pay for groceries go?
There was a huge boom in profits starting in 2022 through to today. We’ve never seen profit-taking like this. It was an unbelievably great time for corporate Canada. When you break it down by industry, most of those profits were going to oil and gas. For example, in the supply chain of potato chips there’s diesel used to farm the potatoes, cook them, and move them to stores. A lot of that increase didn’t go to the grocery store selling the chips. It went to energy companies.
But also remember that the cost of energy is nowhere near 100% of the cost of making pretty much anything.
If you doubled the cost of something because the price of a fraction of it doubled you’re absolutely a thief. That’s what these companies are doing; bad math to steal from stupid people*.
*Anyone can be a stupid person, including those with advanced engineering degrees. Hell, it’s almost more likely for them.
I know what you mean by your wording so I’m not jumping on that, but it’s worth noting that like, eating isn’t a luxury or something that smart people do or rich people or dumb people or whatever. If you have a grocery store in a town/country and it’s the only store (or the vast plurality of realistic options that are all owned by the same company with different faces), you basically don’t have a choice but to submit to this weird “math”, no matter how smart or dumb you are.
Okay I really don’t understand why this wouldn’t push for electrification?
Is it because the big machines they need is made by monopolies like John deer and they refuse to go electric?
Part of the reason is likely that farming equipment is bloody expensive. A new combine harvester can cost nearly a million dollars, and there aren't a hell of a lot of used electrical machines on the market yet. Each farm will have several machines that currently run on gas or diesel. How many can the average farmer afford to replace how fast?
Electrifying farm equipment has huge engineering hurdles. They need a massive amount of power, which would mean very large and incredibly expensive battery packs. Those batteries would take either a long time to charge, or high current charging stations.
During seeding or harvest the machines often run for 16+ hours a day, and are literally out in the middle of a field. Where is the super-fast charging station going to go? They can't easily travel all the machinery back to home base every night, and there's no way it makes economical sense for a farm operation to get chargers installed at every field.
These are not necessarily insurmountable problems. There are a number of similarities to trucking, for example, and that's an industry that's starting to see electrification now. But the logistical problems are much harder than trucking. The biggest reason that John Deere etc... aren't making electric tractors right now is that no one would buy one, because no one has any infrastructure in place for it.
Why are groceries so expensive now...
The Weston's can't survive in that castle on the paltry billions they have.
They need MORE!
Inelastic demand. It's easier to charge more for something if people need it to survive.
If we had competition, the prices would get run down anyway by people trying to expand their market share.
If.
Shouldn’t we be past the asking why phase and more into the solution phase.
Even if things are just gonna be expensive moving forward, the government subsidizes essentials that people need to survive. So even if corporates aren’t being greedy (they are) somethings gotta give, no?
Otherwise people will vote for PP or worse in a few years
We still need to ask why so we can get at the root of the problem. Shrugging and subsidizing is just telling galen weston "keep increasing your prices, and we'll start throwing tax dollars at you."
Line has to go up.