The only thing that is preventing basic living essentials for costing more is whether the capitalist class feel like rising the price or not.
Yep, a huge portion of this recent 'inflation' is not cost increases or actual inflation... just basically the wealthy class turning the screws on everyone else because they can.
Don’t worry, my Econ 101 class states that surely a competitor will come in and operate at a lower cost to recoup that cost for the customers!
Wait… what do you mean the competitors are all increasing prices by the same amount knowing demand for diapers is inelastic and the Nash equilibrium is for them to all match price increases so that they all make more money together?
Surely a new entrant will help!
Wait… what do you mean nobody will invest in a new competitor because the market is “saturated” and even if they did the big brands would just decrease prices in the areas they operate until they run out of cash and fold?
Surely a regulator will help!
Wait… what do you mean the regulators feel price increases are due to “too much demand” for products and are turning the screws on consumers?
"Actual inflation" is just some capitalist a bit further up the supply chain "turning the screws on everyone just because they can". Inflation is the ultimate proof capitalism is an inherently flawed system.
This is just false. The OP had the correct idea, demand for essential goods is inelastic. This doesn't go away if you "get rid of capitalism". All economies have price increases. If you ban them, you just get shortages and things get sold on the black market (as was the case in the Soviet Union).
The real issue is: what is "essential"? The items we think of as essential are mostly conveniences. Disposable diapers are not essential. Washable diapers existed for thousands of years, and they are way better for the environment. Your kids don't have disposable clothes. You just wash them when they are covered in vomit or feces. So why not diapers?
Maybe we should consider alternatives to "essential" items. Toilet paper is expensive? Get a bidet. Baked goods are expensive? Get some butter and flour. Beer is expensive? Good news: alcohol just appears for free when you give yeast food! Your home repairs are expensive? Literally watch a YouTube video.
It's easier than ever to do things on your own. Don't hand out money unless you want to. And realize the choice you are making.
I usually try to see both sides of an argument, give 'em a chance.
For example; Supply chains were truly fucked over by COVID. And believe it or not, it's still an issue in late 2023.
But inflation now is almost entirely corporate greed. They saw what they could get away with and pressed it.
Say you have egg laying chickens. You were selling a dozen for $1, but prices spiked and people were happy to pay $2.
You going to drop your prices out the goodness of your heart? And at the same time, feed prices went up (but came down again). Everything went up! Need to repair the fence? $20 worth of wire is now $40 (but that price came down).
That extra $20 was nothing to me, but I can justify keeping my prices up, or even raising them!
Expand that to megacorp's kinda thinking. In my simplistic case, you are solely responsible for the morality of your decisions, and it might be a hard decision. You gonna take less money nice guy?
For a monster corporation? Nah, that greed is spread over a thousand actors, all sanely acting in their best interest.
Capitalism is the best economic system we got, but the flaws are clear. We need strong worker unions and strong legislative oversight. And that is clear as well.
One problem is that we allowed corporations to go global without a global labor unions and global regulation.
you turn the screws you tear down the bridge, flimsy as it is, it's business-like
I think corporations learned some very dangerous lessons from the pandemic.
They already knew these things, they just needed an excuse to not cause too much of an uproar. Egg prices went up by way too much too quickly that even the government, who rarely actually does anything about this sort of thing, started an investigation. Magically the prices dropped by a lot, but unfortunately still higher than it used to be.
Hey, I didn't finish reading #2, but why isn't my mocha latte ready yet?
It became DIY while you weren't looking. You have to make it yourself but they provide the supplies. Saves on cost cause now they only need 1-2 people at a time running the store.
They literally lock up the baby formula in a cage at my local grocery stores now. You know, so criminal scum with starving babies don't pillage them.
If that doesn't signal imminent collapse I don't know what does.
That isn't a sign of collapse. That just shows that the average retailer would let a baby starve than lose a dime. Its a reflection of the morality that these people have. But of course they never examine themselves deep enough to have that realisation.
The devil's advocate in me says that dealers often cut drugs with formula so there's at least one other reason to keep it locked, but I don't know how well that statement holds up under scrutiny, because it's not like they check to see if you actually have a baby when you buy formula, and it's probably not worth the risk to steal it as opposed to just buying it with the kind of return you'd get from diluting your product.
And yeah, I see razor blades, shampoo, and fucking laundry soap under lock and key in stores all the time. Nobody's cutting drugs with any of those. Shit's getting real fucked up.
I've heard the baby formula drug thing before, but I find it hard to believe you can't mix it with something cheaper like regular powdered milk or flour.
A lot of this stuff is easily resellable down your local flat-roofed pub, and there's practically no punishment for shoplifting.
I asked at Safeway and the guy told me it's because people steal it and then try to return it for cash, not so much for starving babies. Same with the name brand laundry detergent that is now in a cage.
In the US, we have WIC (nutrition assistance for pregnant women, infants and children under 5) that covers formula for parents whose income is less than 185% of the federal poverty level. That does mean that parents who fall over the benefits cliff (make 186% of the fed poverty level) are seriously fucked.
This NYT article from 2005 says it's also stolen to cut drugs, but the bigger thing is reselling it for profit. https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/us/baby-formula-the-locked-case-at-the-front-of-the-store.html
People likely are cutting their drugs with razor blades. Just not in the way you mean here haha.
Formula tins have a tamper-evident seal.
Corporations. Do. Not. Care.
Their incentives go directly against our incentives quite often
Make. Them. Care.
Not sure how exactly, but I was inspired by your assertive capitalization.
Fire does the trick when applied at the right spots.
Antitrust? How quaint. Microsoft showed everyone that antitrust just means "drag out the process until you get a sycophant in office and saunter away with a slap on the wrist."
They also showed that you can aquire a whole company over a weekend with little to no oversight at all.
Sam Altman can eat shit.
Regulatory
Capture
Whachu gonna do ‘bout it removed?
I'm sure all the pro-life politicians who want to save the poor babies will be very concerned about this and congressional investigations will be forthcoming.
Right?
RIGHT?
narrator no, they were wrong.
Unless there is a way to pin it on Biden they aren't interested in doing anything.
Nah babies can live just fine with cloth diapers, they'll just tell you to use those if you're not motivated enough to hustle for bare essentials
Diapers? Those babies should be shitting into their bootstraps.
The work required of us in an economy like this is obscene. Comparing deals and coupons and dodging scams and trying ti save time while every corpo is trying to waste it. I'm not a mother, yet, but imagine realizing you can't afford disposable diapers this week and this is the week you have to spend extra hours cleaning and sanitizing cloth diapers. And all the extra stress on top. Thats if you could afford kids in the first damn place.
Because poor people definitely have washing machines.
No, because that's socialism! Trickle down economics and what not!!
The inflation we are experiencing is artificial
In other news, guillotine futures are up 20% in Q3.
Since the abandonment of gold standard it's definitely artificial.
Money is made up either way. It doesn't matter if it's tied to gold. The value of gold is made up, even if there's a quantifiable physical amount of it. The problem here is a lack of regulation on capitalism. Or just capitalism tbh.
Don't worry the market will regulate itself. /s
Someone should have Robert Reich be their vice president. He could come out every second day and rip into some fucking companies for the shit they do to keep dragging the whole world down.
So I propose a solution:
We start and fund a non-profit organization designed to produce basic living essentials and sell it at the cost to manufacture, regardless of market pressures. Then we all collectively buy from this non-profit and have a functional means of production legally owned and controlled by the people.
Set up strict rules to ban anyone who has ever worked in any upper management position in any for-profit basic essentials producing company from ever holding any position of power in the non-profit. No one from the corporate world at all. No one from any position in state or federal government. No lobbyists or consultants or members of their think tanks or any of their goons.
Use open source designs for the factories and everyone in the community works together to automate them as much as is possible.
Yes this is what I've wanted to do for a long time, I think it's basically inevitable that it'll happen eventually but an actual effort to make it happen faster would be such a positive thing in the world.
The reason I say it's inevitable is because design tools are getting consistently better, hardware is cheaper than ever, and ever more useful stuff is being added to the commons. With ai assisted CAD and ai assisted manufacture we're going to see so many amazing new open source designs getting built.
People are going to start moving away from for-profit designed homegoods like washing machines and printers because they'll be able to get a community designed and tested product modified to their specific needs and tastes then have that fabricated at whatever local firm or tinkerer you want to give your business to.
the world will end before this will happen. You'd get killed if you tried it. Good luck though.
You'll have to make the way the non profit organisation is run or organised, also impossible to gather autocracy in.
Not just hard, impossible. No one should be able to mess with any aspects of the nonprofit, incorruptible, people-owned, affordable (NIPA) organisation.
And even if it is hard and not impossible, it should be made such that it is easier to get back to that situation, than to remove any of the NIPA aspects.
Shareholder primacy is upheld by the state putting every publicly owned company antagonistic to its workers and customers, id est, the public.
This means the companies are forced to charge what the market will bear, and it's the responsibility of the government to regulate prices to keep things affordable.
But this means lobbying by companies is an attack on the public. (It's highly profitable to bribe officials and should be illegal. It also means officials who take lobby money are traitors to the public, the nation and their office, whether or not doing so is legal.
So the justification for bullets is there, and has been for several decades. We're just not very good at seeing when we have nothing left to lose.
I wonder what it would take to convince people to fight for what is right.
Remember this discrepancy every time you hear "they'll just pass the costs on to the consumer" with regards to regulation and taxes. It works the same way in both directions; the price is based on what you're willing to pay, not their operating costs.
research "diaper inflation" for more
Do we know who is setting the price higher? Is it more like it’s 6% higher but so is everything else or more of the manufacturer selling to the storefronts at a higher cost thus forcing grocery stores to set the price higher by 6%?
Because it informs who we should be mad at
Manufacturers set minimum prices for their products. Generally, suggested retail price and minimum advertisable price.
Employee wage increase? Or is that calculated in operating expenses?
The amount of people making babies is degreasing, but the company must grow
Yes, the CEO needs more baby oil to keep the old gears turning.
OpEx includes all salaries.
An aggregate piece increase percentage vs a production cost decrease percentage would be more useful. Brands shift to higher and lower quality and price brackets, so unless they're all going up, it's not much of an issue if you don't have brand loyalty. But I think it's likely most all brands of diapers are going up in price since they saw people were willing to pay ludicrous prices for them.
I mean, its pay ludicrous prices or have an unhappy baby with lots of diaper rash issues if they have sensitive skin.
Parents are between a rock and a hard place on that one. Its not like they can magically make their kids stop pooping.
My ex-favorite tea brands silently cutting 20% of tea bags in the box and raised the price 15%, while keeping the same sized box and make the printed weight and contents smaller and harder to find.
And people call me crazy for getting frustrated.
yeh critical (since they (electorates in my ciuntry since 1970s) empowered banks with all the investment decisions) that those banks see more short term profit (and balance sheet growth), from business loans to small businesses than mortgages, consumer credit, and AAA large corp debt.
Otherwise any potential regulation fron competition is strangled.
unfortunately banks seem to prefer morgtgages over a productive/competetive economy for some really hard to predict reason . . .
I think it was a big mistake to let commercial banks into morgages, i think consumer credit should be heavily limited, and there should be some small business/local limitations on banks, so that they invest some % directly in diverse competetive economy in the places near to where their creditors live. (I know hard to regulate, but harder than regulating a mutinational bank . . .?)
globalised unregulated banking doesnt seem to help with much to me - unless you live in China maybe.
Huggies are not the only diapers.
Unfortunately negative reactions to different brands exists, though. So, not everyone gets a choice. Fortunately for us, Huggies is what gave my daughter rashes. So that was an easy out!
Yeah, diapers are not like some other products, where the generic is just as good. When my kids were babies, we tried multiple cheap brands and they all leaked. Meaning pee and poop went everywhere outside the diaper. It was a less-than-ideal feature for diapers, so we typically went with LUVS, if I recall correctly.
I would urge new parents to try cloth diapering! It can seem daunting at first with all the terminology, but no more so than learning to diaper with disposables. There are some great resources out there that help break everything down. It's how people have been diapering babies for centuries before disposable Pampers came along in the 60s.
For our first, I'm planning on trying cotton prefolds under wool covers. It's more of an upfront cost investment (a few hundred bucks, depending on where you buy them), but will save us money over the long run, not having to buy tons of boxes of diapers. Plus we're planning on reusing the same set for our second.
If anyone needs resources or has specific questions, let me know!
Our first was completely cloth diapered. Our second, we tried too, but for some reason every poop got out of it to the clothes and the increased amount of washing up was too much (imagine how many clothes can 4yo and 11mo stain combined). So now she has the cheapest disposables. When she starts pooping in the potty or at least learns to tell she pooped immediately, we will consider the cloth diapers again, but for now it's too much work.
feel like
Probably less about emotional state and more about whether they have positioned themselves to be able to increase profits without losing marketshare. Afaik companies are focusing more on immediate profitability now that the interest rate stuff is making more speculative investments less attractive.
This doesn't tell the whole story. It seems like the aggregate cost of Kimberly Clark products fell by $75M. But perhaps the diapers did increase in cost? Further analysis is needed.
BORING
Is this Bidenomics?
No, it’s Reganomics. It’s the same BS for the last 42 years.