I cannot believe supermarkets these days, it is insane the increases in prices, I’ve seen £5 for a tube of normal toothpaste and £6 for a tiny Pizza that is sometimes available for £3. How people on modest salaries survive I don’t know.
Quite often I’m starting to notice dark patterns in pricing where things you normally didn’t worry about will have randomly increased by £2-3 and you get the checkout and you’ve spent £25-30 on next to nothing.
I wonder if inequality increases caused by printing trillions of dollars during COVID are anything to do with this inflation? Could it be that making the rich endless more wealthy and increasing asset prices is bad for society?
How do we fix this? Some people think redistribution of the increases the wealthy have had over COVID back to the poor would be a good move, but is this all inequality?
For me the actual dark pattern in pricing is when prices remain fixed but quantity/volume really reduces. It's subtle on the aisle, but if you use online shopping it's blatant when the product you usually order is no longer available and it suggests an item that is identical in terms of the product it is and price, but has a glaring reduction in weight.
The fix is to produce more stuff. It's that simple. It might not be easy though. It would require us to focus on production, remove barriers, streamline regulations, encourage and actively celebrate production.
It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases. So we have less stuff. Combine this with giving people more money and you get inflation.
> It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases.
I cannot emphasize this enough. Wealthy Western nations have been wealthy for so long that people know how to cut up the pie in different sizes more so than they know how to bake more.
There's no incentive to produce more stuff if you can just price gouge your current supply for equal or more profit with less manufacturing investment. Especially for necessities like electronics or food where your entire supply will be sold regardless.
You might say there's then an incentive to undercut, sure, but if you undercut too much you'll be left with no inventory as the rest of the manufacturers decide on fixed prices as a cartel (which has now become the norm in most industries). The trust busting has been nowhere to be seen in the last decades and the results are in.
We have to be careful about how we define our utility function. I'd argue that it's not as simple as just "producing more stuff" but rather being able to focus on producing "more of the right stuff." All production increase is not the same, unless your goal is just "more GDP." Rather, I think what a lot of this discussion alludes to is that more blind production does not necessarily lead to better quality of life (what we really care about in general).
> I wonder if inequality increases caused by printing trillions of dollars during COVID are anything to do with this inflation? Could it be that making the rich endless more wealthy and increasing asset prices is bad for society?
Making billionaires more wealthy doesn't affect inflation much because they are already consuming as much as they want. That money will just increase the price of stocks and bonds - whatever billionaires invest in.
Giving every average Joe a thousand more dollars will increase spending by nearly that amount per person and prices of goods will increase.
Giving money to people who need money is part of the solution, but the biggest part of the solution is making sure human productivity (GDP) is going to make things that make people's lives better.
Because all of europe is in the same or worse place? No matter how much remainers want to blame brexit for everything, it isnt’t always the case. Central europe is around or a few points less than the um while easter and western europe are higher
Trying to be positive in an ocean of poo, making your own tortillas is cheap, fast, kinda fun to do with kids and you can augment them for extra flavour. You can even batch prepare them in advance as long as they're not in contact with air.
Many of those are the same. Pizza dough : once a month take 30 minutes preparing 10 rolls and in the freezer.
Flour and sugar based products are both absurdly high profit margin and the cause of the obesity pandemic (not a coincidence), you could make your own stuff for cheap, or just cut so the majority of flour based products from your diet - either option is a positive direction.
Interesting point. With high inflation and many professions being made obsolete by AI, cooking and baking authentic cultural foods at home may become the new obsession.
on a tangent, either buy fresh tortillas (the package should be very warm, almost hot) or make your own. Get some good tortillas and you'll want the others outlawed as a crime against humanity. I'm fairly anti-government but i would be ok if a law was passed in the fine state of Texas requiring all restaurants to make their own tortillas fresh when ordered.
I find comments like this weird, I never think about purchases that small. I honestly have no idea how much I pay for tortillas normally but $7 would not even be a blip on my mental radar
Two of the most well-known toothpaste brands in the UK are still selling their most 'basic' toothpastes for 100ml for £1, which I don't think is much of a rise on what it's been for the last few years (I think I used to get 125ml for that price).
People on modest salaries either don't spot the cheaper, just-as-good toothpaste that's not as prominent, they think that it's not as good as the ones with lists of all the great things they're supposed to do, or they aren't feeling the squeeze enough to seek it out.
If you drop into an independent chemist you might notice that sometimes the only toothpaste they stock is the 'basic' one, because their customers are price-sensitive, so that's all they'll buy.
Going rate for pizza is around 60p/100g, with a larger than average Aldi 'Meat Feast' pizza coming in at £2.19, which is 39p/100g.
Again, if you're on a 'modest salary', you pick the cheaper products or pick the supermarkets which only really sell the cheaper products.
I'm not saying that prices aren't going up, just that closer to the 'survival' line, there is much less room to increase prices, because people aren't at the point of choosing based on preference, so you can't rely on them switching to a slightly cheaper option from your artificially differentiated product line (yes, you, Colgate-Palmolive). They'll just be forced to stop buying your products altogether.
> most 'basic' toothpastes for 100ml for £1, which I don't think is much of a rise on what it's been for the last few years (I think I used to get 125ml for that price).
Going from 125mL to 100mL for the same price => 20% price inflation.
There's other dimensions than the quality of the toothpaste. The dispenser provides a significantly better usability experience if you're willing to spend an extra $1. The cheapest toothpastes are screw caps that can fall on the floor and take a few moments take off and put on. The hinged pop open/closed interface is simpler.
> I’ve seen £5 for a tube of normal toothpaste and £6 for a tiny Pizza that is sometimes available for £3. How people on modest salaries survive I don’t know.
I took up cooking from scratch as a hobby a couple of decades ago. I highly recommend it.
After a bit of a learning curve, it's cheaper, tastier. and better for you than highly processed foodlike substances.
Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper.
But food is also a class issue. Those with time to spare (ie rich) can indulge in for example "stuffing a mushroom" - Shirley Conran famously recanted twenty years of writing cookery lifestyle books exhorting women to become corden bleu cooks by saying life was to short to stuff a mushroom - and that is kind of my point.
I mean Gordon bloody Ramsey does not prepare food the way he tells you to in his cookbooks - it's too slow and inefficient.
All the recipies I love to cook - getting the temperature of the linguini just right before pouring over eggs and pecorino for carbonara for instance - is frankly, a nightmare nutrition wise (even if it's a hit kid wise) and a plate of chicken breast and five different veg and fruit for after is waaaay better - but how many recipients books will do that, how many blog posts extoll boiled peas.
Maybe we would learn from the staff of life - Bread. In the first weeks of lockdown, flour vanished from shelves - obviously because of a shortage but mostly because flour was diverted from domestic use to go to actual bakers and factories who could efficiently mass produce the staple of life that was then shipped to our supermarket shelves to eat. Yes there were bakers running triple shifts, logistic planners sleeping in the office and HVV drivers going every which way. But in the end feeding millions is like Gorden Ramsey says - if you do it like the instagram post says, you are doing it wrong
I don't think "randomly increasing prices" counts as a dark pattern. It's just a plain and simple economic pattern.
The only reason some companies are able to get away with this is because too many people shop mindlessly without checking prices.
The solution is for everyone to pay attention to prices when we shop: the brands who jump their prices up will have 0 customers.
I'm not saying it's easy, and perhaps grocery store price labelling isn't maximally effective, but when we shop frugally, we actually benefit not only ourselves, but each other.
I'm not defending their actions, but they're exploiting the underlying broken and usurious financial system that is using fiat money that can be printed at will. The system is working as designed.
Living in the UK, yes food prices are rising. But I work for an NGO whose main focus is in East Africa and I've been tracking food inflation there and seeing 200-400% jumps over the past three years.
Perfect storm of the lack of available fertilizer, wheat shortage and poor growing seasons over the past five years is hitting everyone. I don't see it geetting better until the world adjusts; swapping to alternative crops and producing nitrogen fertilizer at country level.
Funny that you mention nitrogen fertilizer, here in Belgium there is a minor agricultural crisis going on due to the ag sector needing to reduce nitrogen emissions.
I agree, the problem is fairly global. So UK specific explanations are unlikely to have much validity. Some punters myopically only considering UK features (such as brexit) is misleading.
Inflation (in general, not food inflation specifically) in the UK is worse than in, say, Germany and France. The reasons for that are specific to the UK, and they do include Brexit. I think it's not myopic to point that out. We shouldn't give a free pass to people who have wreaked economic havoc to the UK just because there are some geopolitical factors that happen to wreak even worse havoc at the same time.
In general there seems to be a weird zeitgeist of negative exceptionalism in the UK at the moment.
Not sure why but generally journos seem to write about issues like they are only hitting the UK when a simple google search shows they aren’t.
It does come across like a weird concerted effort to paint the UK as collapsing since leaving the EU. The majority of journos seem to be able to write only negatively about UK current affairs unless you read something like The Express who are delusional in their own right.
Most recent ones I can think of are the failed space launch and British volt going under.
These were both highly ambitious projects that had a high chance of failure, especially the space launch. It’s unlikely you’re going to get your first launch right, famously it takes many attempts.
When both of these happened journalists seemed to revel in the failure. It was very odd to see.
I understand with these two examples a lot of it has to do with government/brexiteer chest thumping which shon a spotlight on them. However it was still odd to see.
I think this then trickles down to places like HN (who’s membership generally has a bias towards remain) who also see an opportunity to revel in it.
This is odd as well because I can see why Britons or Europeans would be passionate about membership in a regional trade bloc, Americans who get really passionate about it confuse me. As a Briton I didn’t really care when America left NAFTA.
This is assuming the majority of people on HN are American but based on time zones and when articles are posted I’m probably wrong.
Edit:
This is a UK based publication writing about Groceries in the UK which is why it’s so specific. Your comment just spurred something I’ve been thinking recently.
> In general there seems to be a weird zeitgeist of negative exceptionalism in the UK at the moment.
Especially on Hacker News. I tend to avoid UK-based posts on here because the content is fairly predictable: the UK is going to shit and Brexit is to blame, repeated ad nauseam in the absence of any evidence that it's true. If I wanted thoughtless UK doom mongering, I'd read the Guardian or the NYT.
It's because there are narratives to follow, sides to pick. There's no room for facts by themselves, they have to fit some story your pack has bought into.
Right, left, middle, or anarchy, it's all the same; you're part of a herd.
I see a huge difference between people online and normal people.
Obviously we are going through a tough time at the moment. While there are some things unique to the UK (such as the nurses and junior doctors strike), for the most part what we are experiencing is common to most of Europe and often even the USA. I mean look at France - Paris is drowning in rubbish due to bin strikes and protesters are setting things on fire - yet if anything that seems to be being covered as something positive for them. People taking back power and exerting their rights. Last time that happened here, though, it was treated as an almost apocalyptic event and emblemic of Broken Britain. Sure the Paris strikes are ostensibly about pensions, but really they're about more than that.
By default, Brits tend to lean toward the negative side. I think even before Brexit/Tories/etc. most British people would broadly have considered the UK to be a bit shit, and generally complain more than they say anything positive. However, when measured, the UK is in the top 10 countries on a huge number of metrics and isn't particulary awful at anything. I do find the general negativity a bit tiresome, but it's not entirely a bad thing. That negativity is probably partly behind why we have managed to become and remain such a successful and stable country for so long.
Online, though, British people seem to be incredibly negative in a way that I've rarely experienced in person. I figure one reason why people online are so unflinchingly negative about the UK is that online Brits seem to lean very hard left and we're now on our 13th year of Tory leadership. I'm pretty lefty myself, but an awful lot of the chronically online UK types are literally Trots and Tankies (who are, nevertheless, pro-remain #FBPE, despite the contradiction between those views). Look at, e.g. Corbyn's online popularity versus his real (un)popularity with the electoral base. Or how the Tories actually generally get a similar popular vote to Labour, but online it's hard to find a single person who expresses any support for them.
I also think the UK generally gets its news about Europe from US news sources, especially when it comes to economic policy and comparisons. The US news (especially NYT and such) love to paint the US as a capitalist hellscape compared to the utopia of Continental Europe and the Nordics in particular. In reality, of course, the EU and Nordics are a lot more complicated than that, and in socioeconomic terms we're a lot closer to Europe in most ways than we are to the US, but that doesn't seem to feed through so people draw the same comparisons that are popular in US papers. You also get that with the NHS vs USA's system, as though those are the only two options.
Indeed it is not much different here in [redacted].
To answer your question: "Not sure why the UK is being singled out."
The answer to me is simply that it is a UK website www.grocerygazette.co.uk
There are plenty of similar stories about the same kind of inflation here in [redacted] such as [redacted].
With Hacker News being predominately English speaking I suspect plays into why we see more US and UK (and other English speaking countries) related posts vs non-English speaking.
And of course people do love to point out where the UK is suffering these days to put a Brexit spin on it (whether fair or not) as it gets them clicks. Much like a famous or young person dying is almost always reported as "died suddenly" these days regardless of nature of death as it gets clicks with all the anti-vax crowd.
I'm curious why the values aren't identical to within rounding errors for countries like the Netherlands and Belgium which are nearly the same size, in essentially the same location, and don't have different amounts of welfare like north/south Korea or USA/MX.
Can't be that one has tech or purchasing power that the other doesn't, or that food needs to travel a lot further, and I would also not expect vastly different foreign relations (also because EU, but also because the countries are so similar in beliefs and histories).
And similar for slightly different but still nearby and similar countries like Germany, Luxemburg, and the UK. Anyone know what causes these differences?
Edit: to answer your question, I wouldn't look for meaning behind that but rather assume that a limited scope article is a lot easier to write than a broadly scoped one. In the ~global context of HN, the headline then sounds like they're singled out.
A shortage of low-cost labour on which the UK has long been (perhaps too) reliant, and reduced inefficiency (= higher cost of) the import process.
Or, in a word, Brexit.
Everywhere is getting inflation. Supply chain disruption, Ukraine war and a dash of climate change (hasn't really bitten yet compared to the other two). Britain seems to be getting about 5% more than everywhere else.
But the core reason for those shortages were poor weather in Spain etc where the produce is grown, I'd be surprised if the EU didn't have the same issues.
I wouldn't be surprised if those countries such as Spain reduced the amount available for export so that they can meet demand for local markets though, but capitalism would dictate that they sell to the highest bidder instead.
Its not average for Europe. Aside from Germany, rest of Europe is at around ~10%.
The UK is being singled out because its not able to import the groceries it used to do before Brexit now - there has been a low yield crop season in most parts of Europe and the domestic demand for groceries has literally exhausted the supply that can be exported. Since the UK is out of the Eu, its not possible to access the Eu domestic supply anymore and it has to wait for what remains for export.
Media narrative obviously. This looks like a story about the war’s effects on energy and resources. Better to redirect people’s anger so they they don’t lose their appetite for the proxy war.
A good if overly simplistic model of inflation & recession etc... is building a rocket in the game Factorio
The rocket isn't necessarily intrinsically useful for everyone but is important because it is the thing that pulls forward all the demand for the all the commodities and all the intermediate production.
Without the rocket there would be no factories, no jobs, no meaning. The factory MUST run to keep everyone's livelihoods going even though the rocket isn't relevant day to day. It also incentivizes things like innovation, efficiency, etc...
However, building TWO rockets at the same time puts such a resource demand that there start to be shortages and breakdowns. Parts of the factory start shutting down. People are left jobless. One of the most serious is if the factory breakdown cascades to the power system (e.g. money) which causes the entire factory to breakdown.
It's a tough job to figure out how to restart the factory incrementally. Meanwhile everyone is left jobless while this is being debugged.
So there's a balance between how many rockets have to be simultaneously built. If there's too little demand, the factories are idle. Capital rots and there are less jobs. If there's too much demand, then shortages and price spikes will cause an even more serious breakdown.
What gold/bitcoin/austrian philosophers understand is that the price of money HAS to reflect market reality. E.g. in a Factorio game all bottlenecks are important to production but if you mess up the energy bottleneck, then the whole thing breaks down. Having a hack like "manually move a few tons a coal every hour" and forgetting it once is catastrophic. The market conditions have been manipulated with buffer.
The Fed & other central banks are usually concerned primarily with the layers of production that affect the most people. E.g. food and gas are critical. However when the "power supply" is threatened they need to start doing things like bailing out banks even if it seems insane to be focusing on this when people can't afford food.
Meanwhile in Sweden the CEO of ICA, the largest supermarket chain in the country (53% of the market) said yesterday: "It is actually the consumer who controls what they are prepared to pay for a product. In the end, it is they who decide." https://omni.se/icas-vd-det-ar-kunderna-som-avgor-matpriset/...
The consumer decides what they are prepared to pay for a product, unless the demand is inelastic. And for food overall, the demand is inelastic. Consumers cannot just say "food is too expensive for me, so I think I'm going to to go without it this month".
They can choose between the individual products they buy, so it wouldn't be a problem if just some food items got expensive. But the price of food overall is inflating.
> They can choose between the individual products they buy, so it wouldn't be a problem if just some food items got expensive. But the price of food overall is inflating.
That is a false binary. You can still buy flour (or naan or pita), cheese and tomato sauce instead of pre-made pizzas, sacrificing your time against rising food costs. You can buy lentils instead of steak, sacrificing your preferences against rising food costs. Or you can travel further to a warehouse store and buy in bulk...
When enough people act empowered in the face of adversity, we don't have to sweat "greedflation". Retailers will learn their lesson.
Yes, I understand rising prices make life worse. But don't let anyone tell you there's nothing you can do about it. Learn to cook, change stores, eat differently, maybe even move.
"My Pizza Pops went up 25%, I am powerless in the face of inflation!" Just no.
Demand for food overall is inelastic, but the demand for specific foodstuffs is elastic. The measure of inflation we're discussing is across all foodstuffs.
> Consumers cannot just say "food is too expensive for me, so I think I'm going to to go without it this month".
One could be temporarily elastic, e.g. thaw meats from the freezer, eat shelf-stable food from the pantry. And in a few weeks, prices could be different and they do tend to bounce around week to week.
There is something called price elasticity of demand, which is how much demand reacts to changes in price.
Here we're discussing food... People have to eat so demand for food, at least staples, does not change much when prices rise as long as people can afford to pay (and by and large currently they can).
It should also be noted that in developed countries the price of food has collapsed as a proportion of people's income over the last 100 years. So the reality is that even if prices double demand will probably not change much apart from some arbitrages (go to cheaper brands/supermarkets, drop in demand of a few luxury items and non food items).
I hope that continues to be an option. In my neighborhood, they finally changed the signage from a merger that happened a while ago. I now have two Safeways within a mile of my house with the next closest grocer being a high end store 4 miles away and a discount grocer 6 miles away.
I fully expect one or both of those stores to be absorbed by the Safeway/Albertsons/Kroger monolith in the next few years.
Also note that Lidl droppeded its prices and the others came out "predicting" lower prices just hours after Svantesson (finance minister) came out of that meeting with the oligopoly and complained about the lack of competition. I think they got the message, but will it be enough? I doubt it.
The supermarkets in the UK engage in price fixing so consumer can only decide so much when each supermarket has the same price and smaller shops are priced out of the market.
In the UK where big business dominate, the competition is illusory and regulators turn the blind eye.
In an ironic way, the consumers decided to leave the EU and expose the UK to higher inflation. Though much of the world has been seeing severe inflation at this time, it would have probably been better if the UK had access to a broader food market.
The UK still has access to those markets. The problem is not that we can't import goods, but that there are fewer goods to import and they are being sold at higher prices.
For example, in January, food inflation in France was 14.8% and in the UK it was slightly lower at 13.3% and the OECD rate was 15.2%. It's not a Brexit problem; it's a production problem.
The inflation for these products came from the EU, the reason why prices for tomatoes went up is because Dutch farmers have been paying significantly higher energy costs (some supermarkets chose to hold no stock instead of paying these prices too).
The summary is that productivity is down, money supply is way up. The value of money, in particular, the strength of the US Dollar is backed, fundamentally, by the strength of US and US productivity. The problem is that the money printed did not sufficiently go into factors that increased productivity (relative to the money printed) and instead contributed to an asset bubble and consumption (relative to investment in productive capacity).
Unfortunately, the Fed has to raise rates to reduce the money supply (increase the cost of borrowing) which puts downward pressure on productivity. This is not a foregone conclusion but is the likely outcome, hence the need to "do more with less" mantra of tech.
So while the money supply will decrease, the real question is will the money supply decrease relative to productivity. Otherwise, we are basically in for a stagflationary period unless technologies like LLMs produce a step-function increase in productivity and efficiency.
The problem is there is also an inverse relationship between productivity gains due to technology and effort. Meaning technology makes life easier, so people work less, effectively resulting in the same overall output, unless economic conditions dictate otherwise. In which case, inflation may not be a bad thing in the very near short term, provided we can produce our way out of it, which may be possible if LLM technologies result in new industries and job opportunities. (However current thinking indicates the opposite, jobs will likely be eliminated as a result of LLM technologies.
Most food packaging is made with aluminium. Aluminium is down 30% YoY but up 50% in the past 3 years. It's been a wild ride for manufacturers and they increased prices to handle this. Same with energy, the average cost is 50% up from ~3 years ago. Not just electricity that powers up the factories, but the oil for everything logistics.
If you're Unilever/P&G/Nestlé, what do you do? You start cutting costs (less/worse materials - that's called skimpflation), total production volumes or less volume per product (shrinkflation). You also are not as inclined as before to give out promotions and benefits. The good old "pay 1 take 2" is now "pay 1 take half". Retailers get squeezed because they can't just pass the whole price raise down to the end customer, so they suck it up a little and get less profits. They also had more operational costs, so they get screwed (mostly the people working there). The smaller ones may shut down or get M&A'd, the big ones survive.
To make matters worse, the world is simply unpredictable right now. Post-covid you would expect some categories would go up (deodorants, for example), but then you have a war in Ukraine and a global rise in interest rates. When managers can't predict they go with the worst-case scenarios in their pricing strategies, reinforcing all that's bad.
Personally, I'm saving what I can, investing in inflation-indexed bonds and the occasional "buy the dip" for some select stocks, freezing cooked foods with a month in advance, and being very cautious with any job movements. I hope I'm wrong but I believe that will be the way to go for at least a year, if not more.
There is a 2007 book by john Michael Greer - "The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age". It was the first in 10 books on the subject of industrial decline over the course of a few centuries.
I wish so badly that he was wrong about these things, but every day it looks a little more like he got an absolute home run on this topic.
The only other advice I would give to people is, if there is something you need to buy now and you can - do it! Key word here is 'need'. I have been buying in bulk for years now and switching over to equipment that will last a long time. It doesn't mean you will be 100% fine but you can ride the dips as they come.
There's a lot of arguments about the mechanisms of inflation, and its various symptoms, but surely the root cause of inflation is elevated energy prices?
I mean energy underpins the price of everything else in an economy, especially production and transportation, which in turn affects the price of groceries. I guess as far as groceries go there's also a significant labor component, but still, it must surely be the cost of energy as the principal driver of inflation?
Thanks for raising this. Totally.
I think most of the user base here is US centric but from what I can see from the side of the pond is that the biggest worry is that increasing interest rates will do shit all because the deep root of the problem is energy, brexit and all kinds of terrible policies that the Torry governement has been inflicting on the country to become ‘self sufficient’ which had such deep and brand new ramifications our economy that we are actually just making shit up hoping it works. Economists can’t rely on previous data anymore as we’re basically starting ‘brand new’.
Readit News
Quite often I’m starting to notice dark patterns in pricing where things you normally didn’t worry about will have randomly increased by £2-3 and you get the checkout and you’ve spent £25-30 on next to nothing.
I wonder if inequality increases caused by printing trillions of dollars during COVID are anything to do with this inflation? Could it be that making the rich endless more wealthy and increasing asset prices is bad for society?
How do we fix this? Some people think redistribution of the increases the wealthy have had over COVID back to the poor would be a good move, but is this all inequality?
It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases. So we have less stuff. Combine this with giving people more money and you get inflation.
I cannot emphasize this enough. Wealthy Western nations have been wealthy for so long that people know how to cut up the pie in different sizes more so than they know how to bake more.
You might say there's then an incentive to undercut, sure, but if you undercut too much you'll be left with no inventory as the rest of the manufacturers decide on fixed prices as a cartel (which has now become the norm in most industries). The trust busting has been nowhere to be seen in the last decades and the results are in.
Making billionaires more wealthy doesn't affect inflation much because they are already consuming as much as they want. That money will just increase the price of stocks and bonds - whatever billionaires invest in.
Giving every average Joe a thousand more dollars will increase spending by nearly that amount per person and prices of goods will increase.
Giving money to people who need money is part of the solution, but the biggest part of the solution is making sure human productivity (GDP) is going to make things that make people's lives better.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11zwtif/annual_infl...
Many of those are the same. Pizza dough : once a month take 30 minutes preparing 10 rolls and in the freezer.
And as a bonus, less chemicals in your system.
People on modest salaries either don't spot the cheaper, just-as-good toothpaste that's not as prominent, they think that it's not as good as the ones with lists of all the great things they're supposed to do, or they aren't feeling the squeeze enough to seek it out.
If you drop into an independent chemist you might notice that sometimes the only toothpaste they stock is the 'basic' one, because their customers are price-sensitive, so that's all they'll buy.
Going rate for pizza is around 60p/100g, with a larger than average Aldi 'Meat Feast' pizza coming in at £2.19, which is 39p/100g.
Again, if you're on a 'modest salary', you pick the cheaper products or pick the supermarkets which only really sell the cheaper products.
I'm not saying that prices aren't going up, just that closer to the 'survival' line, there is much less room to increase prices, because people aren't at the point of choosing based on preference, so you can't rely on them switching to a slightly cheaper option from your artificially differentiated product line (yes, you, Colgate-Palmolive). They'll just be forced to stop buying your products altogether.
Going from 125mL to 100mL for the same price => 20% price inflation.
I took up cooking from scratch as a hobby a couple of decades ago. I highly recommend it.
After a bit of a learning curve, it's cheaper, tastier. and better for you than highly processed foodlike substances.
Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper.
But food is also a class issue. Those with time to spare (ie rich) can indulge in for example "stuffing a mushroom" - Shirley Conran famously recanted twenty years of writing cookery lifestyle books exhorting women to become corden bleu cooks by saying life was to short to stuff a mushroom - and that is kind of my point.
I mean Gordon bloody Ramsey does not prepare food the way he tells you to in his cookbooks - it's too slow and inefficient.
All the recipies I love to cook - getting the temperature of the linguini just right before pouring over eggs and pecorino for carbonara for instance - is frankly, a nightmare nutrition wise (even if it's a hit kid wise) and a plate of chicken breast and five different veg and fruit for after is waaaay better - but how many recipients books will do that, how many blog posts extoll boiled peas.
Maybe we would learn from the staff of life - Bread. In the first weeks of lockdown, flour vanished from shelves - obviously because of a shortage but mostly because flour was diverted from domestic use to go to actual bakers and factories who could efficiently mass produce the staple of life that was then shipped to our supermarket shelves to eat. Yes there were bakers running triple shifts, logistic planners sleeping in the office and HVV drivers going every which way. But in the end feeding millions is like Gorden Ramsey says - if you do it like the instagram post says, you are doing it wrong
The only reason some companies are able to get away with this is because too many people shop mindlessly without checking prices.
The solution is for everyone to pay attention to prices when we shop: the brands who jump their prices up will have 0 customers.
I'm not saying it's easy, and perhaps grocery store price labelling isn't maximally effective, but when we shop frugally, we actually benefit not only ourselves, but each other.
Like you pay £1.5 for essential product if you scan a card otherwise it is £3.
These should be made illegal.
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oBViOUSLy tHE rUSsIANs dID it ;p
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Perfect storm of the lack of available fertilizer, wheat shortage and poor growing seasons over the past five years is hitting everyone. I don't see it geetting better until the world adjusts; swapping to alternative crops and producing nitrogen fertilizer at country level.
https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/food-inflation (Click on World Tab, and click on the inflation heading to sort - I needed to tap and slide to get it to sort descending).
https://i.redd.it/8hbhiqhowjpa1.png
Not sure why but generally journos seem to write about issues like they are only hitting the UK when a simple google search shows they aren’t.
It does come across like a weird concerted effort to paint the UK as collapsing since leaving the EU. The majority of journos seem to be able to write only negatively about UK current affairs unless you read something like The Express who are delusional in their own right.
Most recent ones I can think of are the failed space launch and British volt going under.
These were both highly ambitious projects that had a high chance of failure, especially the space launch. It’s unlikely you’re going to get your first launch right, famously it takes many attempts.
When both of these happened journalists seemed to revel in the failure. It was very odd to see.
I understand with these two examples a lot of it has to do with government/brexiteer chest thumping which shon a spotlight on them. However it was still odd to see.
I think this then trickles down to places like HN (who’s membership generally has a bias towards remain) who also see an opportunity to revel in it.
This is odd as well because I can see why Britons or Europeans would be passionate about membership in a regional trade bloc, Americans who get really passionate about it confuse me. As a Briton I didn’t really care when America left NAFTA.
This is assuming the majority of people on HN are American but based on time zones and when articles are posted I’m probably wrong.
Edit:
This is a UK based publication writing about Groceries in the UK which is why it’s so specific. Your comment just spurred something I’ve been thinking recently.
Especially on Hacker News. I tend to avoid UK-based posts on here because the content is fairly predictable: the UK is going to shit and Brexit is to blame, repeated ad nauseam in the absence of any evidence that it's true. If I wanted thoughtless UK doom mongering, I'd read the Guardian or the NYT.
Most news sites have become rather terrible since they started optimizing solely for ad revenue.
Are you being facetious ;)
It's because there are narratives to follow, sides to pick. There's no room for facts by themselves, they have to fit some story your pack has bought into.
Right, left, middle, or anarchy, it's all the same; you're part of a herd.
It's for clicks. It's completely disingenuous and one should be wise to take a mental note of the author and publisher.
Obviously we are going through a tough time at the moment. While there are some things unique to the UK (such as the nurses and junior doctors strike), for the most part what we are experiencing is common to most of Europe and often even the USA. I mean look at France - Paris is drowning in rubbish due to bin strikes and protesters are setting things on fire - yet if anything that seems to be being covered as something positive for them. People taking back power and exerting their rights. Last time that happened here, though, it was treated as an almost apocalyptic event and emblemic of Broken Britain. Sure the Paris strikes are ostensibly about pensions, but really they're about more than that.
By default, Brits tend to lean toward the negative side. I think even before Brexit/Tories/etc. most British people would broadly have considered the UK to be a bit shit, and generally complain more than they say anything positive. However, when measured, the UK is in the top 10 countries on a huge number of metrics and isn't particulary awful at anything. I do find the general negativity a bit tiresome, but it's not entirely a bad thing. That negativity is probably partly behind why we have managed to become and remain such a successful and stable country for so long.
Online, though, British people seem to be incredibly negative in a way that I've rarely experienced in person. I figure one reason why people online are so unflinchingly negative about the UK is that online Brits seem to lean very hard left and we're now on our 13th year of Tory leadership. I'm pretty lefty myself, but an awful lot of the chronically online UK types are literally Trots and Tankies (who are, nevertheless, pro-remain #FBPE, despite the contradiction between those views). Look at, e.g. Corbyn's online popularity versus his real (un)popularity with the electoral base. Or how the Tories actually generally get a similar popular vote to Labour, but online it's hard to find a single person who expresses any support for them.
I also think the UK generally gets its news about Europe from US news sources, especially when it comes to economic policy and comparisons. The US news (especially NYT and such) love to paint the US as a capitalist hellscape compared to the utopia of Continental Europe and the Nordics in particular. In reality, of course, the EU and Nordics are a lot more complicated than that, and in socioeconomic terms we're a lot closer to Europe in most ways than we are to the US, but that doesn't seem to feed through so people draw the same comparisons that are popular in US papers. You also get that with the NHS vs USA's system, as though those are the only two options.
To answer your question: "Not sure why the UK is being singled out."
The answer to me is simply that it is a UK website www.grocerygazette.co.uk
There are plenty of similar stories about the same kind of inflation here in [redacted] such as [redacted].
With Hacker News being predominately English speaking I suspect plays into why we see more US and UK (and other English speaking countries) related posts vs non-English speaking.
And of course people do love to point out where the UK is suffering these days to put a Brexit spin on it (whether fair or not) as it gets them clicks. Much like a famous or young person dying is almost always reported as "died suddenly" these days regardless of nature of death as it gets clicks with all the anti-vax crowd.
Can't be that one has tech or purchasing power that the other doesn't, or that food needs to travel a lot further, and I would also not expect vastly different foreign relations (also because EU, but also because the countries are so similar in beliefs and histories).
And similar for slightly different but still nearby and similar countries like Germany, Luxemburg, and the UK. Anyone know what causes these differences?
Edit: to answer your question, I wouldn't look for meaning behind that but rather assume that a limited scope article is a lot easier to write than a broadly scoped one. In the ~global context of HN, the headline then sounds like they're singled out.
Or, in a word, Brexit.
Everywhere is getting inflation. Supply chain disruption, Ukraine war and a dash of climate change (hasn't really bitten yet compared to the other two). Britain seems to be getting about 5% more than everywhere else.
Source: live in UK
I wouldn't be surprised if those countries such as Spain reduced the amount available for export so that they can meet demand for local markets though, but capitalism would dictate that they sell to the highest bidder instead.
The UK is being singled out because its not able to import the groceries it used to do before Brexit now - there has been a low yield crop season in most parts of Europe and the domestic demand for groceries has literally exhausted the supply that can be exported. Since the UK is out of the Eu, its not possible to access the Eu domestic supply anymore and it has to wait for what remains for export.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/28/british-supermarkets-are-rat...
There isnt such a situation like rationing vegetables anywhere else in Europe.
That isn't true at all, the UK is about the same as the Euro area taken as a whole.
> Since the UK is out of the Eu, its not possible to access the Eu domestic supply anymore and it has to wait for what remains for export
The UK is absolutely capable of tapping EU supply, we've got an extensive free trade deal. I'm eating Spanish cherry tomatoes as I type!
Source: https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/food-inflation?con...
All I know is that here in the Netherlands, the prices they're mentioning are normal.
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The rocket isn't necessarily intrinsically useful for everyone but is important because it is the thing that pulls forward all the demand for the all the commodities and all the intermediate production.
Without the rocket there would be no factories, no jobs, no meaning. The factory MUST run to keep everyone's livelihoods going even though the rocket isn't relevant day to day. It also incentivizes things like innovation, efficiency, etc...
However, building TWO rockets at the same time puts such a resource demand that there start to be shortages and breakdowns. Parts of the factory start shutting down. People are left jobless. One of the most serious is if the factory breakdown cascades to the power system (e.g. money) which causes the entire factory to breakdown.
It's a tough job to figure out how to restart the factory incrementally. Meanwhile everyone is left jobless while this is being debugged.
So there's a balance between how many rockets have to be simultaneously built. If there's too little demand, the factories are idle. Capital rots and there are less jobs. If there's too much demand, then shortages and price spikes will cause an even more serious breakdown.
What gold/bitcoin/austrian philosophers understand is that the price of money HAS to reflect market reality. E.g. in a Factorio game all bottlenecks are important to production but if you mess up the energy bottleneck, then the whole thing breaks down. Having a hack like "manually move a few tons a coal every hour" and forgetting it once is catastrophic. The market conditions have been manipulated with buffer.
The Fed & other central banks are usually concerned primarily with the layers of production that affect the most people. E.g. food and gas are critical. However when the "power supply" is threatened they need to start doing things like bailing out banks even if it seems insane to be focusing on this when people can't afford food.
They can choose between the individual products they buy, so it wouldn't be a problem if just some food items got expensive. But the price of food overall is inflating.
That is a false binary. You can still buy flour (or naan or pita), cheese and tomato sauce instead of pre-made pizzas, sacrificing your time against rising food costs. You can buy lentils instead of steak, sacrificing your preferences against rising food costs. Or you can travel further to a warehouse store and buy in bulk...
When enough people act empowered in the face of adversity, we don't have to sweat "greedflation". Retailers will learn their lesson.
Yes, I understand rising prices make life worse. But don't let anyone tell you there's nothing you can do about it. Learn to cook, change stores, eat differently, maybe even move.
"My Pizza Pops went up 25%, I am powerless in the face of inflation!" Just no.
I'm a senior programmer with outrageous salary, and I still paused yesterday looking at the price of beef. Went for chicken instead.
I wish inflation numbers would also include things like "percentage of income spent on just living: food and shelter"
One could be temporarily elastic, e.g. thaw meats from the freezer, eat shelf-stable food from the pantry. And in a few weeks, prices could be different and they do tend to bounce around week to week.
Why does higher priced food keep inflating too if consumer has no control.
Here we're discussing food... People have to eat so demand for food, at least staples, does not change much when prices rise as long as people can afford to pay (and by and large currently they can).
It should also be noted that in developed countries the price of food has collapsed as a proportion of people's income over the last 100 years. So the reality is that even if prices double demand will probably not change much apart from some arbitrages (go to cheaper brands/supermarkets, drop in demand of a few luxury items and non food items).
People in west vastly overestimate how much they have to eat.
We wouldn't have health epidemic if people can just stop eating all the time.
I fully expect one or both of those stores to be absorbed by the Safeway/Albertsons/Kroger monolith in the next few years.
In the UK where big business dominate, the competition is illusory and regulators turn the blind eye.
For example, in January, food inflation in France was 14.8% and in the UK it was slightly lower at 13.3% and the OECD rate was 15.2%. It's not a Brexit problem; it's a production problem.
- https://tradingeconomics.com/france/food-inflation
- https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jan/04/record-133-...
-https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/arti...
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Unfortunately, the Fed has to raise rates to reduce the money supply (increase the cost of borrowing) which puts downward pressure on productivity. This is not a foregone conclusion but is the likely outcome, hence the need to "do more with less" mantra of tech.
So while the money supply will decrease, the real question is will the money supply decrease relative to productivity. Otherwise, we are basically in for a stagflationary period unless technologies like LLMs produce a step-function increase in productivity and efficiency.
The problem is there is also an inverse relationship between productivity gains due to technology and effort. Meaning technology makes life easier, so people work less, effectively resulting in the same overall output, unless economic conditions dictate otherwise. In which case, inflation may not be a bad thing in the very near short term, provided we can produce our way out of it, which may be possible if LLM technologies result in new industries and job opportunities. (However current thinking indicates the opposite, jobs will likely be eliminated as a result of LLM technologies.
If you're Unilever/P&G/Nestlé, what do you do? You start cutting costs (less/worse materials - that's called skimpflation), total production volumes or less volume per product (shrinkflation). You also are not as inclined as before to give out promotions and benefits. The good old "pay 1 take 2" is now "pay 1 take half". Retailers get squeezed because they can't just pass the whole price raise down to the end customer, so they suck it up a little and get less profits. They also had more operational costs, so they get screwed (mostly the people working there). The smaller ones may shut down or get M&A'd, the big ones survive.
To make matters worse, the world is simply unpredictable right now. Post-covid you would expect some categories would go up (deodorants, for example), but then you have a war in Ukraine and a global rise in interest rates. When managers can't predict they go with the worst-case scenarios in their pricing strategies, reinforcing all that's bad.
Personally, I'm saving what I can, investing in inflation-indexed bonds and the occasional "buy the dip" for some select stocks, freezing cooked foods with a month in advance, and being very cautious with any job movements. I hope I'm wrong but I believe that will be the way to go for at least a year, if not more.
I wish so badly that he was wrong about these things, but every day it looks a little more like he got an absolute home run on this topic.
The only other advice I would give to people is, if there is something you need to buy now and you can - do it! Key word here is 'need'. I have been buying in bulk for years now and switching over to equipment that will last a long time. It doesn't mean you will be 100% fine but you can ride the dips as they come.
I mean energy underpins the price of everything else in an economy, especially production and transportation, which in turn affects the price of groceries. I guess as far as groceries go there's also a significant labor component, but still, it must surely be the cost of energy as the principal driver of inflation?
Edit: typos