Swift Current, SK—Retail food prices are rising. To explain these increases, many commentators point to rising prices for farm products and cite drought, other production problems, the pandemic…
Sounds about right, I work for a big food distributor/processor and we have been taking crazy profits basically every quarter since 2020 off of lower and lower volume. Retailers and processors have taken absolute mad bank off of “inflation” recently despite the fact that people are buying less. One would have to think that this is an untenable contradiction; eventually your high prices will not make up for declining volume. Not to mention how high prices strain relations with retailers, creating extra tension, not that I have any sort of sympathy for retailers.
I can’t help but think though by the time this contradiction comes to head in the retail/grocery sector, as we have already seen start to occur in fast food industry, whatever executives that were responsible for it will have long since collected their multimillion bonuses and moved on. The nature of cutthroat capitalist system means there is no incentive whatesoever for industry leaders to care about the future beyond taking superprofits for as long as they can and then fucking off.
Sounds about right, I work for a big food distributor/processor and we have been taking crazy profits basically every quarter since 2020 off of lower and lower volume. Retailers and processors have taken absolute mad bank off of “inflation” recently despite the fact that people are buying less. One would have to think that this is an untenable contradiction; eventually your high prices will not make up for declining volume. Not to mention how high prices strain relations with retailers, creating extra tension, not that I have any sort of sympathy for retailers.
I can’t help but think though by the time this contradiction comes to head in the retail/grocery sector, as we have already seen start to occur in fast food industry, whatever executives that were responsible for it will have long since collected their multimillion bonuses and moved on. The nature of cutthroat capitalist system means there is no incentive whatesoever for industry leaders to care about the future beyond taking superprofits for as long as they can and then fucking off.