The only thing that is preventing basic living essentials for costing more is whether the capitalist class feel like rising the price or not.
The only thing that is preventing basic living essentials for costing more is whether the capitalist class feel like rising the price or not.
I think corporations learned some very dangerous lessons from the pandemic.
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The demand for essential goods is inelastic. They can charge whatever and people still have to but things, especially food, household products, and a place to live.
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They can understaff and underpay employees, and people will choose to fault people for laziness rather than the deliberate corporate choices that lead to the situation.
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Corporations have built such a large market share so as to have created giant barriers to entry that there is zero competition from new businesses.
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Even larger competitor corporations are happy to wink and nod as you both raise prices, cut staff, and give paltry raises because it just means you both make more money, and so long as you don’t say it out loud, it isn’t collusion.
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Don't worry the market will regulate itself. /s
So I propose a solution:
We start and fund a non-profit organization designed to produce basic living essentials and sell it at the cost to manufacture, regardless of market pressures. Then we all collectively buy from this non-profit and have a functional means of production legally owned and controlled by the people.
Set up strict rules to ban anyone who has ever worked in any upper management position in any for-profit basic essentials producing company from ever holding any position of power in the non-profit. No one from the corporate world at all. No one from any position in state or federal government. No lobbyists or consultants or members of their think tanks or any of their goons.
Use open source designs for the factories and everyone in the community works together to automate them as much as is possible.
Shareholder primacy is upheld by the state putting every publicly owned company antagonistic to its workers and customers, id est, the public.
This means the companies are forced to charge what the market will bear, and it's the responsibility of the government to regulate prices to keep things affordable.
But this means lobbying by companies is an attack on the public. (It's highly profitable to bribe officials and should be illegal. It also means officials who take lobby money are traitors to the public, the nation and their office, whether or not doing so is legal.
So the justification for bullets is there, and has been for several decades. We're just not very good at seeing when we have nothing left to lose.
Remember this discrepancy every time you hear "they'll just pass the costs on to the consumer" with regards to regulation and taxes. It works the same way in both directions; the price is based on what you're willing to pay, not their operating costs.
This doesn't tell the whole story. It seems like the aggregate cost of Kimberly Clark products fell by $75M. But perhaps the diapers did increase in cost? Further analysis is needed.
An aggregate piece increase percentage vs a production cost decrease percentage would be more useful. Brands shift to higher and lower quality and price brackets, so unless they're all going up, it's not much of an issue if you don't have brand loyalty. But I think it's likely most all brands of diapers are going up in price since they saw people were willing to pay ludicrous prices for them.
Do we know who is setting the price higher? Is it more like it’s 6% higher but so is everything else or more of the manufacturer selling to the storefronts at a higher cost thus forcing grocery stores to set the price higher by 6%?
Because it informs who we should be mad at
My ex-favorite tea brands silently cutting 20% of tea bags in the box and raised the price 15%, while keeping the same sized box and make the printed weight and contents smaller and harder to find.
And people call me crazy for getting frustrated.
yeh critical (since they (electorates in my ciuntry since 1970s) empowered banks with all the investment decisions) that those banks see more short term profit (and balance sheet growth), from business loans to small businesses than mortgages, consumer credit, and AAA large corp debt.
Otherwise any potential regulation fron competition is strangled.
unfortunately banks seem to prefer morgtgages over a productive/competetive economy for some really hard to predict reason . . .
I think it was a big mistake to let commercial banks into morgages, i think consumer credit should be heavily limited, and there should be some small business/local limitations on banks, so that they invest some % directly in diverse competetive economy in the places near to where their creditors live. (I know hard to regulate, but harder than regulating a mutinational bank . . .?)
globalised unregulated banking doesnt seem to help with much to me - unless you live in China maybe.
I mean, this is what happens when you give these vultures the freedom to do whatever they want!
feel like
Probably less about emotional state and more about whether they have positioned themselves to be able to increase profits without losing marketshare. Afaik companies are focusing more on immediate profitability now that the interest rate stuff is making more speculative investments less attractive.