Corporations are a lot more willing than usual to raise their prices lately, and it’s putting more of the burden of high inflation on consumers.
That may not come as much of a surprise to anyone who has browsed a grocery aisle, kicked the tires at a car dealership or filled up a gas tank of late, but even the Bank of Canada is starting to take notice of the trend, as the central bank continues its battle to wrestle inflation into submission.
Speaking to a parliamentary committee in Ottawa this week, the bank’s governor, Tiff Macklem, told lawmakers that the bank has noticed a troubling new trend coming out of the corporate sector.
For much of the past few decades, any time businesses have seen a jump in their input costs — the amount they pay for things like raw materials, energy and even workers — “they were pretty cautious about passing on [that cost into] the prices they charged for goods and services,” Macklem said.
Their reasoning was simple: they were afraid of losing customers.
Not “it makes inflation worse” - the correct term is “it makes inflation”.
Shockingly, when you don’t come down hard enough on price gougers during a global pandemic, the rest of pf buisnesses get the idea you’re unwiling to punish anyone for price gouging.
Don’t call it inflation, this is price gouging
The price gouging is causing inflation.
They then have segments on the TV telling us it’s our fault for spending more money. Like how the fuck am I supposed to spend less money when all the essentials in life are skyrocketing in price!?
It’s more that wages have simply never kept up with inflation, and now there’s so little room left for the individual, while end stage capitalistic corporations are happily gouging away at stones in search of more blood.
Indeed, but the gap has definitely and noticeably accelerated between them in the last few years. It’s a problem caused by greed ultimately.
The tacit answer goes to politics. Capital is trying to gaslight people into believing that life is not worth living anymore.
Almost like we should have laws to control their greed… 🧐
for the 20 years leading up to 2022, corporate profits were responsible for about one-third of inflation. Last year, however, that ratio jumped to two-thirds, which means that despite legitimate increases in their cost of doing business, their take-home share of every consumer dollar effectively doubled.
Record profits everywhere - except for employees and consumers.
Advice for consumers for much of the past year has boiled down to either trying to cut back on expenses, or increasing income, but Stanford says it’s misleading to put the onus on consumers to solve inflation, since they’re the ones bearing the disproportionate burden of it.
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The sheep can’t hear you over the sound of munching grass. The cattle have no care for what their bells say.
You show me how to eradicate wilful ignorance and deliberate belligerence and I’ll show you a functional society.
You would think we didn’t have a massive communication channel attached to our hips ffs
It might as well be a broken translator.
My translator doesn’t have the “pompous cliché” language pack installed so I’m afraid idk what you said there.
I’m sure you hold that wilful ignorance in high regard.
Likewise with your disdain for us normies. Have a fulfilling day :)
If normies are wilfully ignorant and intentionally belligerent, then yes. Anyone with an iota of cognizance would have disdain for that. But don’t cry about being what you are, if you don’t like it be different.
You can argue about willful and intentional. Political corruption gives evil people a means with which to undermine education. Not a hard concept.
Lack of education undermines democracy, wilful ignorance undermines personal intelligence, deliberate belligerence undermines communication.
Ones own ignorance can be eliminated by their own actions alone.
To remain uneducated is to hate democracy.
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You can lead a troglodyte to knowledge but you can’t make them think.
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Of course you miss the point. Thanks for being the perfect example.
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I dunno, your doom and gloom shit is pretty old
You can think theres no hope if you like, but kindly shut the fuck up about it if youre not interested in trying to fix things.
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No one is ignoring reality.
You can acknowledge shits fucked without falling into dispair about how utterly pointless and unfixable it is.
Its not unfixable.
I dont give a shit if youve got depression dude, get a therapist or meds. The world isnt over, and your doom and gloom bullshit isnt helping improve the situation.
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Wouldn’t picking off small players just make the problem worse? We’d have even less options than we do now.
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But what do you do when all the products are overpriced?
If it is a luxury, don’t buy. If it is a necessity and if possible, buy used, repair, or make do with what you have.
If an absolute necessity, grit your teeth and buy. But do as much as you can so you’re buying Vimes $50 boots instead of the $10 trash. Then it’ll last.
Nah, I’ll go with theft. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Mums always give the good advice.
Edit: wasn’t trying to be snarky. This is literally the only thing most people have the power to do to make change. Listen to mum.
GNU Terry Pratchett.
Every dollar of profit is a dollar exploited from the the supplier, the worker, and the customer.
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Always has been. They’d still have slaves if we let them… Oh wait.
Where I live there’s only one company responsible for public transport for the whole country/state/province and they have increased fares for busses by 7% and are now increasing train fares for most adults too (not the elderly though) just only young people and people below retirement age being affected and there’s no support for decreased fares for people in poverty or jobless or disabled. Prices had been frozen for about a year or two because of “cost of living” yet money is going less further this year because wages haven’t kept up and goods are still expensive so the least well off is going to be hit harder by the increase to public transport.
The same where I live applies to electricity and water. The governments of the past sold them off to the public to raise revenue for election promises and ever since the prices of their services have skyrocketed.
Electricity in particular is a complete scam as they set up a market of private resellers that provide the illusion of competition but they’re all around the same price as they all buy their electricity from the same single wholesaler.
We even let companies extract our gas and then sell it back to us at international market rates. My country is dumb.
One of the products we use at our business is going up about 25-30%
We are locked in to contracts that last 3-5 years. We will be eating that cost for awhile now.
the definition of inflation is too much currency going after too few goods, all of this blaming the companies or the workers shows the hand of the writer not understanding basic capitalist economics. so the writer is most likely either ignorant or a shill
