I mean, that’s 4 years of our lives taken! 4 years of opportunities that were more challenging because they wanted a number on a computer to go up! 4 years of feeling worse than necessary about my finances and management of them and general personhood because i felt like i couldn’t afford anything because everything was priced egregiously!
And now they’re saying ‘oh well we fixed it now’. Fuck you!!! Get over yourselves! Holy shit, I can’t wait to happily be friends with the giant corporations again!! Just the arrogance that we’re happy to once again be at their beck and call because they changed the numbers they could’ve always changed. Sickening.
And I feel like I have a brain disease because i’ve been worrying and posting for years about how disgusting it is that they’re just cranking the numbers up to see what’ll happen and obviously no one will stop them because this is an oligarchy — and i kept getting well-ackshullyied into the ground by esteemed logical posters explaining how supply chains work. Well look at this shit you motherfuckers!
Just the amount of incredibly deep and sophisticated social engineering is so disgusting:
It’s a savvy play for shifting perceptions of value, crucial for consumers in the decision-making process of where to shop for bread and eggs. Customers benefit by saving some money; retailers possibly benefit even more by being known as the company that magnanimously trimmed prices.
Go to hell, stop shifting my value perception. I should be able to decide what I feel about milk or zucchini. When I think about a croissant I should be thinking about France, not Target pricing strategies.
Most importantly, the theater of making grand pronouncements about lower prices is great for retailers’ reputations. Forget about all the price hikes grocery retailers and food brands implemented in the last few years — now companies would like consumers to focus on the savings they’re offering. “They’re all leaning into this inflation-oriented messaging,” says Stambor, which he notes is interesting because food inflation isn’t high at the moment. It’s the accumulation of past inflation that we’re still feeling the sting of; the prices just didn’t come down.
And we’re meant to thank them for this! I hope to god they can’t put the genie back in the bottle with this. I won’t forget 2020, I’ll hate these bloodsuckers til the day I die.
Unfortunately, there is no real oversight to regulate, let alone prevent price gouging. The only option available to anyone is to not buy. Many of the commodities vendors basically ‘know’ that people wont exercise that option, so they firmly believe in the legitimacy of what theyre doing. For any meaningful change to occur we absolutely must tighten our purse strings for the long haul to demonstrate that it is we who are keeping them alive.
For anyone who still thinks Capitalism can be “fixed” and doesn’t need to be fully replaced with Socialism, Wage Labor and Capital is an excellent place to start.
It’s basically the corporations hoping for something like “miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify” and “It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”
We have observed an incredible acceleration in accumulation of money in the hands of the ultra-rich. This alone tells us that supply chain is not the issue. The issues are greed of the bloodsucking class and complicity from the governments around the world that should monitor and regulate the prices of basic necessities but don’t.
The problem is that we have 2 groups of people who experience this problem: the easily deluded religious people, who will fall for moral wedge issues based on religion, and the people who realize things should be different and will vote in their interests.
The second problem is many of the people who want to change things will try to implement strategies that don’t adhere to classical economics and will create market distortions, so if more “liberal” people are voted in, they may do more harm than good for poor people if they ignore economic principles.
The third problem is that there are way more stupid religious idiots that are easily manipulated than people who vote their interests.
We got robbed blind during the pandemic.
Not just in terms of price gouging, mind you. There’s a reason that billionaires’ cumulative wealth went up with the exact same amount it went down for ALL THE REST OF US.
95% of all dollars in existence were “minted” (digitally, ofc) in the last couple of years. That essentially means the dollar in your pocket is already worth just a few CENTS, you just don’t know it yet. But we will.
So the “free market” has been so consolidated into large mega-corps that they just price fix now without fear of punishment because they’re too big to fail or have such deep pockets that they own the political landscape.
Free market just means free to squeeze the remaining middle class until there’s nothing left.
It used to be that only the telecoms and tech companies were consolidated enough to pricefix, now every sector is, and the economy is spiraling downward at record pace.
The saddest part is that they’re choosing this. The richest know that they could be paying thriving wages, and get even richer. They know that they could create co-op monopolies and get even richer. They aren’t going for a high score on wealth. They’ve seen the future, and are going for a high score on human suffering and death, because it won’t be possible ever again once the rich are overthrown and we create sensible distribution methods that don’t allow one person to hoard hundreds of millions of people’s worth of resources.
It was always about removing any intervention by the powers of the state (which in Democracy are controlled by voters) so that the positive feedback loops in money aggregation in most markets (basically any market with barriers to entry isn’t free, especially if that barrier relates to land ownership, so the more money you make, the more you own, the more money you make) would turn those people who started with the most money - as in a system with such feedback loops in place, starting advantages such as being born rich are unassailable - into oligarchs.
As that system polls wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer, of course it will eventually destroy the middle class and countries ends up looking a lot like dictatorship Brazil in the 70s - only two classes, rich and poor and pretty much nothing in the middle.
Thank you for posting this. I feel the same way but I’m not sure what to do about it :/ I already try to spend as little as possible. I’ve thought about trying to make a vegetable garden cuz in a way it’s free food but just haven’t :/
I wonder what will happen when they squeeze so hard nobody has anything left? How will they stay in business when nobody has money? Do they think every other company will go out of business but they’ll be fine? What do they think the end game will be?
I remember all the large chains I used to like who I feel have fucked me over and hold a grudge against them.
Arizona Ice Tea is an example of a brand that really has not fucked me over as prices have gone higher and I keep rewarding them with more purchases. It’s not just that they have a good value, it’s also that they haven’t tried to exploit me.
We need to ignore the coupons, new catchy deals, and other bullshit that these large corporations are trying to use to lure people back. Corporations should feel lost profits for decades when they tarnish their brand by fucking over customers and we need to vote with our wallets to show their greed also showcases a lack of business acumen.
The new lower prices are all performative headline makers to get the proles to stop sharpening their knives. Lower a few (definitely not all) items for press purposes / loss leaders.
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Unfortunately, there is no real oversight to regulate, let alone prevent price gouging. The only option available to anyone is to not buy. Many of the commodities vendors basically ‘know’ that people wont exercise that option, so they firmly believe in the legitimacy of what theyre doing. For any meaningful change to occur we absolutely must tighten our purse strings for the long haul to demonstrate that it is we who are keeping them alive.
We shut everything down, but we did not stop consuming. It’s the law of supply and demand. Next time, no shutdown.
Next time, just fucking die so I can consume.
People need the economy to survive. We killed a lot of poor people.
Kill Capitalism.
For anyone who still thinks Capitalism can be “fixed” and doesn’t need to be fully replaced with Socialism, Wage Labor and Capital is an excellent place to start.
It’s basically the corporations hoping for something like “miniplenty malquoted chocolate rectify” and “It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grams a week. And only yesterday […] it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grams a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it.”
Welcome to socialism, comrade.
We have observed an incredible acceleration in accumulation of money in the hands of the ultra-rich. This alone tells us that supply chain is not the issue. The issues are greed of the bloodsucking class and complicity from the governments around the world that should monitor and regulate the prices of basic necessities but don’t.
The problem is that we have 2 groups of people who experience this problem: the easily deluded religious people, who will fall for moral wedge issues based on religion, and the people who realize things should be different and will vote in their interests.
The second problem is many of the people who want to change things will try to implement strategies that don’t adhere to classical economics and will create market distortions, so if more “liberal” people are voted in, they may do more harm than good for poor people if they ignore economic principles.
The third problem is that there are way more stupid religious idiots that are easily manipulated than people who vote their interests.
It’s infuriating
You’re not alone.
There are at least three of us…but probably more.
We got robbed blind during the pandemic. Not just in terms of price gouging, mind you. There’s a reason that billionaires’ cumulative wealth went up with the exact same amount it went down for ALL THE REST OF US. 95% of all dollars in existence were “minted” (digitally, ofc) in the last couple of years. That essentially means the dollar in your pocket is already worth just a few CENTS, you just don’t know it yet. But we will.
Not to doubt, but 95% seems high. Is there a source?
You’re correct, 95% is overblown, but it’s still mindboggling: 20% of the total M2 supply was created in 2020 alone, and it has gone up since:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/53091/were-a-large-fraction-of-us-dollars-in-existence-printed-since-2020
Which still amounts to theft by inflation, which is something the founding fathers warned explicitly about.
So the “free market” has been so consolidated into large mega-corps that they just price fix now without fear of punishment because they’re too big to fail or have such deep pockets that they own the political landscape.
Free market just means free to squeeze the remaining middle class until there’s nothing left.
It used to be that only the telecoms and tech companies were consolidated enough to pricefix, now every sector is, and the economy is spiraling downward at record pace.
The saddest part is that they’re choosing this. The richest know that they could be paying thriving wages, and get even richer. They know that they could create co-op monopolies and get even richer. They aren’t going for a high score on wealth. They’ve seen the future, and are going for a high score on human suffering and death, because it won’t be possible ever again once the rich are overthrown and we create sensible distribution methods that don’t allow one person to hoard hundreds of millions of people’s worth of resources.
It was always about removing any intervention by the powers of the state (which in Democracy are controlled by voters) so that the positive feedback loops in money aggregation in most markets (basically any market with barriers to entry isn’t free, especially if that barrier relates to land ownership, so the more money you make, the more you own, the more money you make) would turn those people who started with the most money - as in a system with such feedback loops in place, starting advantages such as being born rich are unassailable - into oligarchs.
As that system polls wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer, of course it will eventually destroy the middle class and countries ends up looking a lot like dictatorship Brazil in the 70s - only two classes, rich and poor and pretty much nothing in the middle.
Thank you for posting this. I feel the same way but I’m not sure what to do about it :/ I already try to spend as little as possible. I’ve thought about trying to make a vegetable garden cuz in a way it’s free food but just haven’t :/
I wonder what will happen when they squeeze so hard nobody has anything left? How will they stay in business when nobody has money? Do they think every other company will go out of business but they’ll be fine? What do they think the end game will be?
I remember all the large chains I used to like who I feel have fucked me over and hold a grudge against them.
Arizona Ice Tea is an example of a brand that really has not fucked me over as prices have gone higher and I keep rewarding them with more purchases. It’s not just that they have a good value, it’s also that they haven’t tried to exploit me.
We need to ignore the coupons, new catchy deals, and other bullshit that these large corporations are trying to use to lure people back. Corporations should feel lost profits for decades when they tarnish their brand by fucking over customers and we need to vote with our wallets to show their greed also showcases a lack of business acumen.
The new lower prices are all performative headline makers to get the proles to stop sharpening their knives. Lower a few (definitely not all) items for press purposes / loss leaders.