Inflation Concerns and Reasons

I remember thinking at the start of the pandemic "I wondering if everyone sitting at home and not spending their money will cause inflation down the line?". Now of course I expected everything to be much more normal by September 2020 (boy! Wrong about that, speaking as an Australian...).

I don't know how anyone thought we could go 2 years without productivity from our workforce, but still subsidize their labour, prevent them from spending their money (can only buy so much take-out..), and not have inflation at the end.

Take that situation, combine it with high shipping costs, a war in Ukraine sparking an energy crisis, and COVID-Zero in China and well... not hard to see how it happened.


Hot take: This sucks for a lot of people and more could be done (like taxing excessive corp profits) to help those in need. But, in the long run, this is a good thing. Zero or near zero interest rates were silly. A dollar (or a Pound or a Euro) had lost all sense of value. We needed to come back down to earth after such easy money policy being normal for so long.

Now will we have a hard landing or a soft landing? No one knows.

 

Scary times ahead for sure.

 

Not just big oil, big Grocery too.
Kroger has had record quarterly profits over and over for the last 3 years (and many qtrs before then).
Items "on sale" at Kroger are usually still higher in price than Wal-Mart's.
Wal-Mart has a HUGE problem keeping things in stock, and continues to deplete the Name Brand groceries in favor
of either Store Brand, or off-brand labels.

So we have to shop both to get what we want. But it is apparent that a lot of people don't want to bother with it,
so they do all their grocery shopping at Kroger. A lot of people just use the on-line shopping. With Kroger, there
are times, I swear, there were more Picker Employees out on the floor with their multi-bin carts than there
were people physically shopping.

 

I live about 50 minutes from one of the largest Amazon distrubution centers in the US.
But no produce.

 

Yes, just not here.

To be honest, ALL of the decent produce suppliers in Cincinnati are gone.

Local farmers market is the only way to get fresh produce.

The biggest supplier here, Castellini produce, (the family who owns the Reds)
Buys the crappiest shit of produce they can find at pennies on the dollar.

Picks through it and repackages it as fresh.

(If anyone wants to argue with me about this, I worked for them for a few years.
I became so disgusted about their business doings, I had to quit).

The small produce suppliers (Gentile's Brothers) were put out of business by Castellini.

Kroger, biggest grocery in the state. Fucking lies about "buying local".

It's all from Castellini at the cheapest price they can get.

There was an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer about local produce growers being dropped left and right by Kroger.

Also, this isn't an unfounded rant. I worked for Kroger as a warehouse supervisor for years, I saw it first hand.

Our grocery purchases in Cincinnati area are some of the worst in the USA.

 

Fucking everyone else refused as garbage.

We would get in 20 pallets of orange boxes, pick through them to to pull out anything not rotten, and end up with maybe 5 pallets.
All of which would go on a truck to Kroger.

 

I just paid $7 for a dozen grade A large eggs.