Greed is now baked into capitalism. Morals and ethics be damned, squeeze and squeeze and see what the market and consumer will bear. So what if much of the population is struggling economically, and more have been thrown into outright poverty. And that record number of people are homeless and sleeping rough.

Consolidation and deregulation always benefits the few over the many, all the while claiming it will be beneficial to consumers. I’m always amused by the religious folks who defend free market greed as though God is a cruel, exploitive being who’s big on dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Margin expansion under the guise/cover of inflation should be criminal.

What I would love to see one day is the margin pocketed for every product sold on display next to the price tag.

Retailers could have chosen to eat these higher costs and weather lower profit margins, but instead, the FTC found that on aggregate retailers passed all higher costs onto consumers and raised prices even more to increase their profit margins, too. This finding isn’t totally new, several economists and researchers (including me) pointed out this trend at the time. https://www.foodandpower.net/latest/ftc-supply-chain-disruption-grocery-food-processing-report-apr-24