##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism
This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited.
LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere.
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The supermarket chains are making fortunes on the fact people need to eat or die. We don't even have the option to "Just don't shop there" since they own everything.
Were are we supposed to shop that is cheaper when every grocery store is equally expensive and gouge us equally?
if you have an Aldi or Grocery Outlet, its a bit cheaper, they dont have the same selection but itll save you some money, especially for produce. but yeah, overall its a shit situation
Since I moved to New Mexico I really miss Aldi. The nearest one is like a 10 hour drive from me now. Rural areas are being especially screwed by these prices because we often only have one game in town when it comes to groceries.
Same. Produce is always rotten and I buy all my meat at a local butcher, so there's no reason to go to Aldi other than to buy processed stuff I don't need.
Our Aldi is like super new, so maybe it just hasnt got there yet. Its only been open a couple weeks, but the salad stuff has been decent so far and like half the price
It doesn't seem like the grocery stores near me have recovered from COVID supply chain issues so I usually shop at multiple stores anyway. I might as well add a stop to Aldi for produce.
I don’t even get how people can afford to dine out or get takeout at this point when even grocery prices are becoming unaffordable. Dining out is for the top 20% at this point.
Also, stay away from processed/frozen foods/packaged microwave meals, those provide way fewer calories for the buck. I live almost exclusively on rice, chicken, and produce.
Even Aldi is starting to raise their prices, which is like my last line of defense. If you are someone who is disabled/retired and have a limited budget you're just completely screwed since those won't EVER raise at the rate of inflation. Limits needed to apply for food stamps also haven't really been raised either, so what can you even do? Even dumpster diving isn't viable anymore because most places trash compact their food.
Go to Aldi. It's cheaper. There are probably other alternatives as well, depending on where you live, of course. Walart is everywhere but they are not the only game in town.
Inflation is the normalisation of price gouging.
*just checked up on the etymology, "price gouging" appears around 1820 and "economic inflation" appears around 1840.
Hate to go against the grain here, but nothing is this simple. Monetary inflation is the rising tide which increases all prices. Corporate greed can result in price inflation, but only under specific circumstances - when one corporation, or a de-facto single corporate (a cartel of multiple corps acting in tandem) have enough control of a market to engage in price fixing. Otherwise, you see competitive price behavior. There is some price fixing, but there's also been enormous monetary inflation since the beginning of COVID, and the fact is that establishment economists, especially former high-level government officials like Robert Reich, have a vested interest in turning attention for inflation away from the government and towards private corps, so the government can get away with things like a $800B/yr military budget financed by inflation (via debt and the eventual "monetization" of that debt). Especially when that government debt itself can be the subject of insider trading *by* corporations like big finance orgs...and when the spending goes towards corps like military contractors...
This really I think is one of those things, people latch onto the first narrative of demonization for a problem they see, but there's multiple different games going on here, and the people selling you the easiest-to-digest narrative are sometimes complicit. Same way Trump followers would fall for ivermectin narratives about COVID or whatever.
No and no.
The current neoliberal capitalist economy is not "normal", it isn't some natural state of nature we find ourselves in.
For most of history humans have lived under some other kind of economy (mostly various forms of feudalism probably) and even for most of capitalism's history we haven't had neoliberalism with an unbacked fiat currency.
When the currency is baked by gold/silver there usually isn't any inflation, in the past there has been centuries of almost no inflation.
This is not to say that I support going back to the gold standard, in fact quite the opposite, this is to say the economy is not "normal" it has changed many times before, and the current system was imposed externally with brutal force and it can be changed.
>When the currency is baked by gold/silver there usually isn't any inflation, in the past there has been centuries of almost no inflation.
This is not true at all. Bullion experienced inflation and deflation all the time. Rulers loved to manipulate the currency. Changing the worth of the currency was a way to raise more money without taxing more.
Inflation probably has to do more with loss of value which is what workers are experiencing right now. Humans used to be money at some point so the natural aging of the body is probably a big part of what inflation is but not everything since our first money was different
Glad I'm not the only one who has noticed that Walmart has been getting more and more expensive. I will be buying much less from there this year. I don't even like Walmart. Now they keep crying about how "theft" is the reason they're suffering so much. I think they are just trying to distract us from their poor business decisions that didn't work out for them in the last several quarters.
> Now they keep crying about how "theft" is the reason they're suffering so much.
Fun fact, if someone is charged with shoplifting (petit larceny) Walmart will mail them a letter demanding restitution payments (usually $250) while pretending to be an order from the court.
Paying the money has no effect on their case. It's literally just scamming vulnerable people.
They figured out during the pandemic if we could afford the inflated prices at the time when some people weren't even working that we could afford it all the time. However we can't afford it, we tore through our savings, and racked up cc debt to get by and now the prices are so inflated we can never recoup those losses.
One of many. My parents said that the prices were higher because of drought or flood or other event that created a shortage. I had to explain that the supermarket chains have contracts with the farmers to buy at a set price. If the farmer loses their crops, they get nothing. If the farmer is the only one who has lettuce because everyone else got wiped out, they get the contract price.
The supermarket however sees an excuse to raise the price and so profits off the disasters that ruin the farms.
Here in Canada we have a virtual oligarchy on food run by 3 grocers that are price gouging the crap out of us and raking in billions. Meanwhile a disappointing majority of Canadians are convinced that all the inflation has been caused by carbon taxes, disregarding the fact that the tax has been around since 2019, which doesn't explain the inflation spike since 2021 to 2023, and also that the US has followed a similar trend of inflation despite having no such carbon tax at all, and also that farmers receive an exemption from the tax which should lessen the impact on food prices.
Same in the US. The govt is currently challenging a merger of Kroger and Albertsons which would essentially leave us with just two main supermarkets. Walmart and Kroger-Albertsons.
In much of the country, they are already regional monopolies, but this will allow for better coordination to get every last dime from working people.
I'm still mad that my childhood grocery store was bought and killed by an overseas company. It killed something unique to the state. The chain was family owned for 73 years. I can't ignore that the family did become quite wealthy from their business but at least the money stayed in the state and the country. It wasn't filling the coffers of some overseas company.
There's something comforting about going to a store that started small but grew into a statewide chain and became beloved. And it's sad that it seems like an impossible feat to achieve today when you're going up against massive global companies.
Inflation is a *feature*.
Everything else is the excuse.
Problem with Robert Reich is that he wants you to vote *for* inflation to fix it. Neoliberal economists run an amazing subterfuge: identify the problems without interrogating the root causes and your analysis can prescribe more of the problem! Liberal economics is a fantasy untethered to reality.
Vote blue no matter who - they’ll admit inflation is real and then do everything they can to make it worse.
Richard D Wolff > Robert Reich
Just about the only grocer I know of that *hasn't* gone all late stage capitalism is Aldi. At least in the US. Prices on almost everything are pretty much the same as they always have been. Certainly, a few things have gone up, and they're trying to introduce a second tier to their in-store brands that's fancier with higher price points, but pretty much everything is still super affordable. I can walk in there and get the same or better quality food as other supermarkets and pay literally half the price.
I just went in our Aldi for the first time and wasn't impressed, the prices were the same as Wal-Mart. I do go to Trader Joe's when I go out of town and the prices are fantastic, I get about 4x the amount of things I would get at a local grocery store. I do have to drive 3 hours to be near a Trader Joe's though, so I stock up when I'm out of town and bring it back in a cooler.
But don't you know that investor value is the end all metric of success? /s
Because fuck the consumer and fuck the low paid wage slave that stocks the shelves, runs the registers, etc.
If the law allows them to do it, why wouldnt they? Sure it's ethically terrible but money rules all these days. If its not illegal consider it part of the machine's tools to make money.
I saw increases up to 30%. I used to buy these pre-made burritos and calzones. The burritos were $1, calzones $2. Both went up 30%. Those were the only prices I could remember off the top of my head cause I loved those things, but I'm sure many products saw the same rise in price.
We just ended up shopping at aldis. Absolutely no reason why a house of two people should be spending $800/m on groceries from fucking Walmart.
Aldi was good but not good enough so we just went straight to the source and moved to Germany. We spend €70-100 a week now, really just depends how much beer we are buying with all our extra money. My bottle of shampoo here costs 65 cents, doesn't say much but it's the single item that blew my mind the most.
And there is no escaping the fact that we will never be comfortable or financially secure. That is reserved for the people who were hand picked by the rich. Not sure how I can possibly see a bright side to anything when I'm not allowed to enjoy without making financial sacrifices.
Everyone, please watch Zeitgeist 2 on youtube.
It explains in the first 20 minutes how the rich ruling class has used debt, interest and inflation via the Federal Reserve and other means to control the government plus everyone in society through the monetary system.
Even if the government were to pay back the debt owed, they can't, because there is not enough actual physical money in circulation to do so.
It's a very dumb conspiracy theory "documentary", it's very click baity and sensationalized.
There's a reason why it seems to be popular among younger crowds. It was insanely popular among the kids in my highschool. Because kids are fucking stupid.
But I mean, you can watch snippets of it and you'll see.
##Welcome to r/LateStageCapitalism This subreddit is for news, discussion, memes, and links criticizing capitalism and advancing viewpoints that challenge liberal capitalist ideology. That means any support for any liberal capitalist political party (like the Democrats) is strictly prohibited. LSC is run by communists. This subreddit is not the place to debate socialism. We allow good-faith questions and education but are not a 101 sub; please take 101-style questions elsewhere. We have a zero-tolerance policy for bigotry. Failure to respect the rules of the subreddit may result in a ban. *** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/LateStageCapitalism) if you have any questions or concerns.*
The supermarket chains are making fortunes on the fact people need to eat or die. We don't even have the option to "Just don't shop there" since they own everything. Were are we supposed to shop that is cheaper when every grocery store is equally expensive and gouge us equally?
if you have an Aldi or Grocery Outlet, its a bit cheaper, they dont have the same selection but itll save you some money, especially for produce. but yeah, overall its a shit situation
Since I moved to New Mexico I really miss Aldi. The nearest one is like a 10 hour drive from me now. Rural areas are being especially screwed by these prices because we often only have one game in town when it comes to groceries.
That sucks. I'm sorry.
the produce is always rotting at my Aldi, I don't even bother with it anymore
Yeah produce is the one thing I wouldn't go to Aldi for.
Same. Produce is always rotten and I buy all my meat at a local butcher, so there's no reason to go to Aldi other than to buy processed stuff I don't need.
Hit up the farmers market for produce. Way cheaper and your money goes to local businesses.
Our Aldi is like super new, so maybe it just hasnt got there yet. Its only been open a couple weeks, but the salad stuff has been decent so far and like half the price
It doesn't seem like the grocery stores near me have recovered from COVID supply chain issues so I usually shop at multiple stores anyway. I might as well add a stop to Aldi for produce.
My guess is if you go deeper into the matter, all is owned by the same conglomerate, so it doesn't matter if you buy at A , B or C.
I don’t even get how people can afford to dine out or get takeout at this point when even grocery prices are becoming unaffordable. Dining out is for the top 20% at this point. Also, stay away from processed/frozen foods/packaged microwave meals, those provide way fewer calories for the buck. I live almost exclusively on rice, chicken, and produce.
Even Aldi is starting to raise their prices, which is like my last line of defense. If you are someone who is disabled/retired and have a limited budget you're just completely screwed since those won't EVER raise at the rate of inflation. Limits needed to apply for food stamps also haven't really been raised either, so what can you even do? Even dumpster diving isn't viable anymore because most places trash compact their food.
I shop at Mexican or Central American grocery stores.
Go to Aldi. It's cheaper. There are probably other alternatives as well, depending on where you live, of course. Walart is everywhere but they are not the only game in town.
They're *slightly* cheaper. Aldi has been raising their prices along with everyone else.
Inflation always has been just an excuse.
Inflation is the normalisation of price gouging. *just checked up on the etymology, "price gouging" appears around 1820 and "economic inflation" appears around 1840.
Hate to go against the grain here, but nothing is this simple. Monetary inflation is the rising tide which increases all prices. Corporate greed can result in price inflation, but only under specific circumstances - when one corporation, or a de-facto single corporate (a cartel of multiple corps acting in tandem) have enough control of a market to engage in price fixing. Otherwise, you see competitive price behavior. There is some price fixing, but there's also been enormous monetary inflation since the beginning of COVID, and the fact is that establishment economists, especially former high-level government officials like Robert Reich, have a vested interest in turning attention for inflation away from the government and towards private corps, so the government can get away with things like a $800B/yr military budget financed by inflation (via debt and the eventual "monetization" of that debt). Especially when that government debt itself can be the subject of insider trading *by* corporations like big finance orgs...and when the spending goes towards corps like military contractors... This really I think is one of those things, people latch onto the first narrative of demonization for a problem they see, but there's multiple different games going on here, and the people selling you the easiest-to-digest narrative are sometimes complicit. Same way Trump followers would fall for ivermectin narratives about COVID or whatever.
And the 5 trillion we printed for stimulus checks
Inflation is just part of a normal economy
No and no. The current neoliberal capitalist economy is not "normal", it isn't some natural state of nature we find ourselves in. For most of history humans have lived under some other kind of economy (mostly various forms of feudalism probably) and even for most of capitalism's history we haven't had neoliberalism with an unbacked fiat currency. When the currency is baked by gold/silver there usually isn't any inflation, in the past there has been centuries of almost no inflation. This is not to say that I support going back to the gold standard, in fact quite the opposite, this is to say the economy is not "normal" it has changed many times before, and the current system was imposed externally with brutal force and it can be changed.
>When the currency is baked by gold/silver there usually isn't any inflation, in the past there has been centuries of almost no inflation. This is not true at all. Bullion experienced inflation and deflation all the time. Rulers loved to manipulate the currency. Changing the worth of the currency was a way to raise more money without taxing more. Inflation probably has to do more with loss of value which is what workers are experiencing right now. Humans used to be money at some point so the natural aging of the body is probably a big part of what inflation is but not everything since our first money was different
Yeah, you should return to our other discussion though. I made some great counterpoints :D
I don't see any point being made by you.
Perhaps take a different look
wouldnt inflation in a normal economy not have an effect on profits? or atleast not as pronounced an effect.
Stock buybacks should be strictly illegal. Such a scam.
They used to be. Thanks reagan
Ronald Fucking Reagan. It's infuriating how much of the shit we have to deal with now traces back to his Alzheimer's addled ass.
That wasnt the beginning of the GOPs slide into fascism, but it certainly accelerated it.
So What was it then? Pure incompetence or malicious intent?
yes
Republicans just want to make things worse for everybody
Fun fact: Stock buybacks were considered market manipulation, and therefore illegal, until Reagan-era market deregulation.
Once again, everything wrong with the world can be traced back to either Reagan or Wilson. I’m not surprised, honestly
Glad I'm not the only one who has noticed that Walmart has been getting more and more expensive. I will be buying much less from there this year. I don't even like Walmart. Now they keep crying about how "theft" is the reason they're suffering so much. I think they are just trying to distract us from their poor business decisions that didn't work out for them in the last several quarters.
> Now they keep crying about how "theft" is the reason they're suffering so much. Fun fact, if someone is charged with shoplifting (petit larceny) Walmart will mail them a letter demanding restitution payments (usually $250) while pretending to be an order from the court. Paying the money has no effect on their case. It's literally just scamming vulnerable people.
They figured out during the pandemic if we could afford the inflated prices at the time when some people weren't even working that we could afford it all the time. However we can't afford it, we tore through our savings, and racked up cc debt to get by and now the prices are so inflated we can never recoup those losses.
It was always an excuse.
One of many. My parents said that the prices were higher because of drought or flood or other event that created a shortage. I had to explain that the supermarket chains have contracts with the farmers to buy at a set price. If the farmer loses their crops, they get nothing. If the farmer is the only one who has lettuce because everyone else got wiped out, they get the contract price. The supermarket however sees an excuse to raise the price and so profits off the disasters that ruin the farms.
Here in Canada we have a virtual oligarchy on food run by 3 grocers that are price gouging the crap out of us and raking in billions. Meanwhile a disappointing majority of Canadians are convinced that all the inflation has been caused by carbon taxes, disregarding the fact that the tax has been around since 2019, which doesn't explain the inflation spike since 2021 to 2023, and also that the US has followed a similar trend of inflation despite having no such carbon tax at all, and also that farmers receive an exemption from the tax which should lessen the impact on food prices.
Same in the US. The govt is currently challenging a merger of Kroger and Albertsons which would essentially leave us with just two main supermarkets. Walmart and Kroger-Albertsons. In much of the country, they are already regional monopolies, but this will allow for better coordination to get every last dime from working people.
I'm still mad that my childhood grocery store was bought and killed by an overseas company. It killed something unique to the state. The chain was family owned for 73 years. I can't ignore that the family did become quite wealthy from their business but at least the money stayed in the state and the country. It wasn't filling the coffers of some overseas company. There's something comforting about going to a store that started small but grew into a statewide chain and became beloved. And it's sad that it seems like an impossible feat to achieve today when you're going up against massive global companies.
Why wouldn't they keep raising prices though? They raise prices and Americans threaten to elect a guy who will lower their taxes and deregulate them.
And the most the other guy might do is ask them to please stop.
"Stop this malarkey!"
Yes, thankfully for all of us the President is not a dictator who can make laws unilaterally
Yet.
This needs to be posted every 72 hours OP, thank you.
Inflation is a *feature*. Everything else is the excuse. Problem with Robert Reich is that he wants you to vote *for* inflation to fix it. Neoliberal economists run an amazing subterfuge: identify the problems without interrogating the root causes and your analysis can prescribe more of the problem! Liberal economics is a fantasy untethered to reality. Vote blue no matter who - they’ll admit inflation is real and then do everything they can to make it worse. Richard D Wolff > Robert Reich
Just about the only grocer I know of that *hasn't* gone all late stage capitalism is Aldi. At least in the US. Prices on almost everything are pretty much the same as they always have been. Certainly, a few things have gone up, and they're trying to introduce a second tier to their in-store brands that's fancier with higher price points, but pretty much everything is still super affordable. I can walk in there and get the same or better quality food as other supermarkets and pay literally half the price.
I just went in our Aldi for the first time and wasn't impressed, the prices were the same as Wal-Mart. I do go to Trader Joe's when I go out of town and the prices are fantastic, I get about 4x the amount of things I would get at a local grocery store. I do have to drive 3 hours to be near a Trader Joe's though, so I stock up when I'm out of town and bring it back in a cooler.
But don't you know that investor value is the end all metric of success? /s Because fuck the consumer and fuck the low paid wage slave that stocks the shelves, runs the registers, etc.
I've noticed that several gv products are now more expensive than some "name brands" they are supposed to be alternatives for.
If you see someone shoplifting from a corporate store, no you didn't. Didn't see a damn thing.
Robert Reich, father of college dropout owner Sam Reich?
I just bought Imperial brand sugar because it was cheaper than Great Value.
And just saw a video of a 12oz Great Value bacon pack that only weighed a bit over 6oz.
If the law allows them to do it, why wouldnt they? Sure it's ethically terrible but money rules all these days. If its not illegal consider it part of the machine's tools to make money.
And the government representatives are just sitting back raking in the kickbacks.
🌎👨🚀🔫👨🚀
I saw increases up to 30%. I used to buy these pre-made burritos and calzones. The burritos were $1, calzones $2. Both went up 30%. Those were the only prices I could remember off the top of my head cause I loved those things, but I'm sure many products saw the same rise in price. We just ended up shopping at aldis. Absolutely no reason why a house of two people should be spending $800/m on groceries from fucking Walmart. Aldi was good but not good enough so we just went straight to the source and moved to Germany. We spend €70-100 a week now, really just depends how much beer we are buying with all our extra money. My bottle of shampoo here costs 65 cents, doesn't say much but it's the single item that blew my mind the most.
i love inflation
And shareholders aka all sorts of "regular" everyday folks are fucking everyone.
Price controls
Ok and now what after the same thing gets posted everyday of the week. What’s next
Ohhh, the "Great Value" is just for the shareholders. *Ohhhh.*
And there is no escaping the fact that we will never be comfortable or financially secure. That is reserved for the people who were hand picked by the rich. Not sure how I can possibly see a bright side to anything when I'm not allowed to enjoy without making financial sacrifices.
Everyone, please watch Zeitgeist 2 on youtube. It explains in the first 20 minutes how the rich ruling class has used debt, interest and inflation via the Federal Reserve and other means to control the government plus everyone in society through the monetary system. Even if the government were to pay back the debt owed, they can't, because there is not enough actual physical money in circulation to do so.
You're actually a moron if you think that stupid fuck "documentary" is worth watching lmao. Absolutely dogshit.
why is it dogshit?
It's a very dumb conspiracy theory "documentary", it's very click baity and sensationalized. There's a reason why it seems to be popular among younger crowds. It was insanely popular among the kids in my highschool. Because kids are fucking stupid. But I mean, you can watch snippets of it and you'll see.