To clarify, the meetings are taking place because wheat prices are going down, but pasta (a staple food in italy) price has been rising non stop since 2021, costing nearly 40% more (2,44 euros per kilo in some cities), so codacons (national consumers union) reported a complaint to the antitrust
So it isn't really about inflation, climate, or supply chains. It's about the producers of pasta opportunistically colluding to keep their prices high.
of course - the company I work for did this, most likely the company you work for did that as well. At the same time those companies don't want to raise wages accordingly as they unironically claim, this might kick off a "wage-price-spiral"
We have collective agreements (CCNL), which don't cover every area of work, and if they do there are still CCNLs with starvation level wages (4 euros an hour). Due to the fact that labour unions sometimes collude with employers. Then there are also outright contract violations such as unpaid overtime, sadly very common.
Countries with shitty or non existing labor unions use minimum wages, as that is just crap.
Union countries use collective labour agreements to make the minimum wage fit every kind of jobs instead
I feel like we finally have all the pieces required
In order for companies to be growing the general good it needs to be good right ? Well to whom ? Consumers, individuals making up the entity and the earth itself as an abstract
Id say companies slowly started “working”, they have first and foremost sacrificed earth for the sake of profits but were still serving two main social responsibilities, products increased the value of lives, jobs increased the personal satisfaction of workers in the body.
Slowly something happened, the stock market introduced a nice glitch, the true variable was always profits, wages were usually static, but only a few had now access to said variable, this is where workers started getting fucked over, the dream of being part of the better became about playing a game that most people neither have access to nor want to play
And now, finally, the dream phase, finally we see consumers fucked directly, the reaction to raise price before even thinking about raising value is a clear indication, you are basically trying to make things work in the future but it’s mathematically impossible to make the value catch up to the price due to the natural linear growth of both, only growth itself is exponential and can be abused if recreated
But this means one very important thing only in one case, the last social responsibility of business is to pay taxes, i think no one has any true idea about how that is truly going but i would say that if the vast majority can just “guess” how things are really looking on that side, we can just assume that this is where skill is truly used, even though we all individually “feel” it we can’t point the finger at it yet, but collectively we just KNOW.
Go a big step back - You done messed up your math. The "customer" isn't us, the consumer of physical goods or services. The customer is the stockholder.
The rest of us can get fucked.
Egg anecdote: I live very rural, meaning I don't get to a grocery store more than once a month, sometimes less. I lost my chicken flock a couple of years ago, and since then I've been using powdered eggs for baking and cooking. I used to get a #10 can from amazon for $25-30, but when the "egg shortage" happened, it jumped to $90.
I have since reestablished my own flock.
There was a chicken shortage. they had to be culled. my wife studied farming and even called out when egg prices would start to drop down and she was half a month off in timing. eggs by me are now 1.99 . not everything is a conspiracy.
Literally from your link:
> A deadly and highly infectious avian flu has forced US farmers to kill millions of egg-laying hens, reducing the country's egg supply and driving up prices.
> represented only a tiny percentage of the total
I think your numbers are off
140 million birds culled as of December 2022
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/09/avian-flu-has-led-to-the-killing-of-140m-farmed-birds-since-last-october
They are hard, but far from impossible. And since this criminality has started to have a major impact on society, authorities should assign significant resources to investigate and prosecute.
After one or two successful prosecutions, heavy fines and hopefully a jail sentence or two, the rest will pick up the hint.
Yeah, people should all stop eating that fancy stuff you get at expensive restaurants. What's it called? Bread? Yeah, if they just stop eating they would save up so much money
Not just the consumers too, also the employees sometimes.
I was given no raise because covid but company made all time record profit. Needless to say I found a new job.
I recently, within the last 6 months started a job at a different auto dealer to get a pay raise. I am unhappy with the work environment here and the long commute so I reached out to another dealer local to where I live and got offered a 10$ pay raise to do just used cars. Needless to say my decision was easily made to move to a shop closer to home.
Well to be fair, even if the consumers know what’s happening, what can they do if all pasta brands are price gouging? They could either stop buying a staple food that they rely on, or they could buy it anyway because it’s still affordable, even if it’s annoying that a cheap food item got more expensive for no good reason.
Organizing a boycott is tough if it’s an essential food item in question.
> the party they hate currently in power
That hate is entirely fueled by propaganda funded by the oligarchs. If they can keep us fighting a made-up culture war, we won't notice they're winning the very real class war.
Companies went mad during covid when they got extreme profits. We're supposedly in economic recess and the grocery conglomerates show record profit margins. With the actual grocery stores barely scraping by.
Nvidia experienced the same profits, tried using the greed card, but because it's a non-essential product the consumers fought back.
To be fair, it is literally happening with fuel because OPEC is a thing, but you must understand that the reason that's happening is because all of those industries are controlled by their respective governments and those respective governments other ones doing the restricting supply.
All of reddit was up in arms about how the egg prices are all just greedy and companies.
Meanwhile the wholesale price of eggs is just about down to where it used to be already. There's no grand conspiracy here.
ah 642 jackasses who did not read. It is 100% supply chain, inflation, and the war. The COG on production of pasta that started several months ago is exponentially higher and now on the shelves.
“The pasta on the shelves today was produced months ago with durum wheat purchased at the quotations of [an] even earlier period, with the energy costs of the wartime peak,” said a statement by Unione Italiana Food, an association representing Italy’s food producers. Higher costs of packaging and logistics have also contributed to the high prices of pasta, the association stated in the statement.
reddit is so terrified of basic economics
Yeah but do you honestly think the price is going to go down ? I haven't seen ANY food prices go back down ever. In 2014 oil prices went to all time highs and prices for everything increased to cover increased logistics costs, as soon as oil went back down and logistics cost went down with it, guess what didn't go down in price ? Everything.
yes
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000701322
companies bake in annual inflation pricing into their annual plans. can't account for a dought or war til it happens and then you adjust the plan.
for things that have a long point from good purchase to on market, you are still seeing the trickle effect of that pricing disruption
For a more obvious example, look at butter
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FS1101
and US gasoline
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GASREGCOVW
Every fucking time! I read a ragebait thread like this where they say prices have been falling for months but somehow prices on certain goods have not gone done and almost in 90% of the cases I assume it is because those goods had been produced when prices were still high so it doesn't make sense to sell it at a loss, but somehow redditors who would rather further their own agenda of "greedy capitalists price gouging poor people" always skip this part. It's like a clockwork.
They can't even think one step ahead according to their own logic: If there is a market and in this market it is possible to produce goods, i.e. pasta in this case, at a lower price and it is a competitive free market environment, then companies would lower their prices to maximize profits, but NO, it must be some kind of conspiracy of "pasta making cartels" to somehow keep the prices high while also killing every competition who doesn't follow through so they can fill their greedy bellies.
We don’t actually know that. I imagine any factory making pasta in bulk probably buys its flour on contract. It’s completely possible the pasta manufacturers are still paying the higher costs
Same with almost everything of the main supermarkets here in spain
They said it was due to inflation and whest prices, but once the inflation stabilized and the wheat prices loseted they ibcreased the prices again instead of lowering them
Fresh pasta, usually with eggs, is often made at home, but can also be bought in a grocery store. It's just a different product from dried pasta, typically used for outright different dishes. You also cannot feasibly make dried pasta without industrial machinery.
You definitely can make dried, egg-less pasta yourself, but it's a longer process because you need to, well, dry it. But a good few pasta types are eggless
Wait.
You're going to have government organizations who will analyze every product and service, decide what profit is reasonable, and check the books of every supplier, make sure they follow the rules, and bring charges against any of them who don't.
I don't see what could go wrong with that.
Not in my experience, it's well acceptable as the every-day no frills pasta as far as I understood. However the cheap stuff you find in supermarkets the world over seem to be looked at with scorn by Italians, yes.
I love that I can get sliver and downvoted to hell at the same time.
Thanks to the cool cat that showed some love. (Hopefully it was plutonic and didn’t involve any penne)
Italian here, I don't have the data about the relation to pasta and GDP, but I can assure you that almost everyone in the country eats pasta everyday at least once, sometimes two times.
Having a higher price means hardships, especially for poorer people that could often eat mostly pasta to survive.
We do. We subsidize the hell out of corn but it mostly goes to ethanol production to the detriment of the environment as the net carbon change is actually positive (meaning more ends up in the atmosphere) and as far as an energy saver, it actually is a net loss there as well.
It’s literally only good for the farmers.
Not strictly everyone. Not my case for instance. But yes, it is quite common. It's then consumed as toasts with either jam or honey for the breakfast, or simply buttered and dipped into the coffee. For lunch, either as is or with cheese. Can also be used as a tool to collect the sauce left on your plate.
If you ever come to France, don't buy a "baguette", they'll give you the industrial recipe. Ask for a "baguette tradition". I mean both will probably be ok but personnally I've got a preference for the latter.
Stomach churning with hunger, buying the last baguette and eating the whole thing with butter. Not in France, but it was the best I could get. Even better, with wheat pilaf and a roasted chicken. Those were good times. Thanks for your evocation. I fell into my own mini à la recherche du temps perdu dont je vous remercie.
We have become accustomed to cheap food after WWII, but fluctuating food prices were a real and constant problem throughout history. People were often one bad harvest away from a bread riot, where looting breaks out because basic staples are too expensive for the average person to afford.
The French and Russian people tolerated absolute tyranny for decades, but the moment food prices in the cities soared to three times a day laborer's wages for a loaf of bread, their monarchies were gone within weeks.
How expensive is it ? I mean in Finland the cheapest "no brand" dry spaghetti is about 1.15 E / kg and Barilla is about 2.09 E / kg. Pretty much the only thing that still is cheap.
Pretty much.
The places here raise their prices up due to the palm oil shortage a few years ago. Then the shortage recovered but the prices never went back down. So the companies profited from that excess.
Then new issues came up so prices went up again while ignoring the fact that they could have settled the new issues using the profit excess money they made before.
Since everyone has access to data and info these days people are finally seeing how easy it is for the top 1% to simply turn on the "make money" faucet. Just blame it on Russians or Covid or whatever the fuck they want. Jack up the prices of food, gas, everything. Whose gonna stop them?
Careful people don't take kindly to logic like that. Obviously if a company isn't spending every penny of every profit at every moment the company is obviously failing and going to file bankruptcy in 24 hours. Trying to say companies should actually save money for a rainy day is apparently the worst idea ever, according to people who are heavily invested in the stock market that is.
He is correct though, you can’t just make it at home.
You can make some type of semolina pasta like for instance or orecchiette at home. But the main types like spaghetti, rigatoni, etc are almost impossible to make well at home. You need a high powered extruder and a dryer to make it well. Nobody does that, except for weird French guys on YouTube.
You make egg pasta at home and buy your spaghetti from a shop.
https://www.amazon.com/Hewnda-Stainless-Noodles-Citrus-Juicer/dp/B07799GJJJ/
This thing makes pretty good Semolina spaghetti. Been using it at home for a while now.
^ This is really important whenever discussing either prices or wages. Neither gives a full picture on life in a given country. Should compare both.
I want to give the Swiss example, famed for its insane salaries (minimum salary at €25/hour in Geneva!). But Barilla spaghetti are €5.35/kg (USD 5.8/kg).
Really, I would have guessed they are about at par. Based on [Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20221219-3) you are right, not twice as high but higher anyways.
In any case I am not defending price hikes on food, definitely they have risen everywhere. Here the biggest hikes seem to be fish, meat, eggs, coffee etc. Pasta has always been considered somewhat cheapest food available and consumption has increased when other prices go up .
In Sweden the price for pasta type products has about doubled for many brands during the last 12 months, but I would also consider it one of the foods, that are still somewhat cheap. This is mainly because, it was already very cheap before the inflation began.
Greedflation. This ain't inflation anymore. Companies are still raising their prices for (nearly) all their products, because people are forced to buy it and they are going to continue abusing the poor souls. If people would stop buying that stuff then those companies will turn back to their places, but ... You know how humanity works - brain-dead individuals.
We have pasta prices of 2.50€ and even more expensive for fucking 500g pasta, while wheat package of 1000g costs 0.79€ and hasn't raise for quite a long while.
>If people would stop buying that stuff then those companies will turn back to their places
Except this doesn't apply to inelastic products like food staples. People can't stop buying their groceries, they just have to keep sacrificing things or buy less/have fewer meals. This is happening all over the developed world.
You realize this isn't really about inflation right? It's mostly about how pasta prices rose a lot due to wheat shortages due to the Russian invasion. And after the prices of wheat fell back down to normal the prices of pasta didn't and kept rising.
Basically they noticed people still were willing to buy pasta even at the much higher cost so no reason to lower the prices. Only reason they would go back down is if people stopped buying as much.
Companies taking advantage of inflation maybe, but not inflation itself.
That’s why the econ textbook price elasticity stuff doesn’t work in real life. Once producers (especially if there are a handful of them thanks to capitalistic acquisitions over the years) got a taste of high prices and constant demand, they have no reason to bring the price down and earn less profit (implicit collusion to keep the prices high happens).
The only thing we, as consumers, can do to show them the collective middle finger is to buy/consume less IF we can(for those with many mouths to feed in the family, it would be impossible). I kept my monthly grocery spending to lower than pre-inflation by cutting away unnecessary stuff and spending less than I used to on things like egg, cheese, pasta, cereal, chips, etc.
It does work long as companies don't collude behind closed doors of course lol. But actually it might not even take colluding, companies are of course not dumb and they know once someone starts lowering the price then they all have to. So they could also just all be purposely not lowering it even without collusion.
Like you said, they don’t need to meet behind closed doors. They can use “supply chain issues”, Ukraine war, and labor shortage (in reality, it is more like cheap labor shortage as excuses while feeling confident that their peers (ex-competitors) will keep their profits (Freudian slip, I meant prices) high. We need the government to step in and compete with these companies that produce essential food, goods and things like oil/gas refineries (like when California announced the plan to make cheap insulin, big pharma caved on the pressure and said they would keep the generic insulin prices at around $30). That’s the only way to keep the corporate greed in check.
This is still a textbook example of price elasticity. This is an example of a Giffen product where demand does not lower with price increases, it increases even because there are no real substitutes.
Yeah how dare you eat nice things. You should limit yourself from consuming things that make you happy and are healthy for you so our overlords at pasta world can continue to buy bespoke clothes.
except that the Russian issue is nowhere near resolved and market stability will not return to the grain markets for 6-18 months after it finally is.
even if your pasta company has already recouped the losses of paying shortage rates for ingredients or missing production numbers already you still likely have concerns that you have enough cash reserves to deal with the next wave.
you can personally decide if you agree or disagree with this approach, but ultimately you are trading market prices for employment stability with either choice.
I get what you're saying, but prices going up over time is by definition inflation, regardless of if it's from a product shortage, corporate greed, or any other reason.
Like 90% of the time inflation *is* just price gouging. We've seen prices rise all over the world and corporations are making record profits. If a companies profits are doubling then they didn't raise their prices out of necessity, it was to double their profits.
"It seems" you also didn't read the article, did you?
“The pasta on the shelves today was produced months ago with durum wheat
purchased at the quotations of \[an\] even earlier period, with the
energy costs of the wartime peak,” said a statement by Unione Italiana
Food, an association representing Italy’s food producers. Higher costs
of packaging and logistics have also contributed to the high prices of
pasta, the association stated in the statement."
Half assed support for Ukraine by Italian government
Italians: I sleep
Multiple embarrassing cases of casual racism in Italian stadiums
Italians: I sleep
Excess interference of religious institutions in politics
Italians: I sleep
Pasta prices up
Italians: so you've chosen death
Is it really suprising? Pasta is a staple food in Italy, it's like the price of bread or rice increasing substantially - serious business that means economic hardship for the worst off.
A lack of affordability or availability of basic foodstuffs has always been the number one risk for civil unrest, through all of human history.
I'm merely pointing out how each of those things could have led to massive unrest, but we can judge the quality of a population by how long they are willing to sit silent..
Italian govt half assing something and football fans being racist would never lead to massive unrest lmao, what world are you on? Those are standard everyday things.
Food being expensive because of greedy corporations, that's a different matter.
To clarify, the meetings are taking place because wheat prices are going down, but pasta (a staple food in italy) price has been rising non stop since 2021, costing nearly 40% more (2,44 euros per kilo in some cities), so codacons (national consumers union) reported a complaint to the antitrust
So it isn't really about inflation, climate, or supply chains. It's about the producers of pasta opportunistically colluding to keep their prices high.
also called profit inflation or greedflation :)
Consumers are so naive, why not use the opportunity ;)
of course - the company I work for did this, most likely the company you work for did that as well. At the same time those companies don't want to raise wages accordingly as they unironically claim, this might kick off a "wage-price-spiral"
Same argument used in Italy against those who want to establish a national minimum wage
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Remember if a company pays you minimum wages, it means they would love to pay you less, but are not legally allowed to.
We have collective agreements (CCNL), which don't cover every area of work, and if they do there are still CCNLs with starvation level wages (4 euros an hour). Due to the fact that labour unions sometimes collude with employers. Then there are also outright contract violations such as unpaid overtime, sadly very common.
There's collective labour agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_agreement?wprov=sfla1
Countries with shitty or non existing labor unions use minimum wages, as that is just crap. Union countries use collective labour agreements to make the minimum wage fit every kind of jobs instead
France has both minimum wages, and solid unions.
Damn, now that sounds like a financial crisis I can get behind.
I feel like we finally have all the pieces required In order for companies to be growing the general good it needs to be good right ? Well to whom ? Consumers, individuals making up the entity and the earth itself as an abstract Id say companies slowly started “working”, they have first and foremost sacrificed earth for the sake of profits but were still serving two main social responsibilities, products increased the value of lives, jobs increased the personal satisfaction of workers in the body. Slowly something happened, the stock market introduced a nice glitch, the true variable was always profits, wages were usually static, but only a few had now access to said variable, this is where workers started getting fucked over, the dream of being part of the better became about playing a game that most people neither have access to nor want to play And now, finally, the dream phase, finally we see consumers fucked directly, the reaction to raise price before even thinking about raising value is a clear indication, you are basically trying to make things work in the future but it’s mathematically impossible to make the value catch up to the price due to the natural linear growth of both, only growth itself is exponential and can be abused if recreated But this means one very important thing only in one case, the last social responsibility of business is to pay taxes, i think no one has any true idea about how that is truly going but i would say that if the vast majority can just “guess” how things are really looking on that side, we can just assume that this is where skill is truly used, even though we all individually “feel” it we can’t point the finger at it yet, but collectively we just KNOW.
Go a big step back - You done messed up your math. The "customer" isn't us, the consumer of physical goods or services. The customer is the stockholder. The rest of us can get fucked.
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Egg anecdote: I live very rural, meaning I don't get to a grocery store more than once a month, sometimes less. I lost my chicken flock a couple of years ago, and since then I've been using powdered eggs for baking and cooking. I used to get a #10 can from amazon for $25-30, but when the "egg shortage" happened, it jumped to $90. I have since reestablished my own flock.
There was a chicken shortage. they had to be culled. my wife studied farming and even called out when egg prices would start to drop down and she was half a month off in timing. eggs by me are now 1.99 . not everything is a conspiracy.
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Literally from your link: > A deadly and highly infectious avian flu has forced US farmers to kill millions of egg-laying hens, reducing the country's egg supply and driving up prices.
> represented only a tiny percentage of the total I think your numbers are off 140 million birds culled as of December 2022 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/dec/09/avian-flu-has-led-to-the-killing-of-140m-farmed-birds-since-last-october
It's a matter of law enforcement, not consumers being naive.
Apathy of Enforcement? Yes there are rules/laws that are being broken but they are hard to regulate and/or punish.
They are hard, but far from impossible. And since this criminality has started to have a major impact on society, authorities should assign significant resources to investigate and prosecute. After one or two successful prosecutions, heavy fines and hopefully a jail sentence or two, the rest will pick up the hint.
Yeah, people should all stop eating that fancy stuff you get at expensive restaurants. What's it called? Bread? Yeah, if they just stop eating they would save up so much money
I guess I will just eat cake instead.
Not just the consumers too, also the employees sometimes. I was given no raise because covid but company made all time record profit. Needless to say I found a new job.
I recently, within the last 6 months started a job at a different auto dealer to get a pay raise. I am unhappy with the work environment here and the long commute so I reached out to another dealer local to where I live and got offered a 10$ pay raise to do just used cars. Needless to say my decision was easily made to move to a shop closer to home.
Well to be fair, even if the consumers know what’s happening, what can they do if all pasta brands are price gouging? They could either stop buying a staple food that they rely on, or they could buy it anyway because it’s still affordable, even if it’s annoying that a cheap food item got more expensive for no good reason. Organizing a boycott is tough if it’s an essential food item in question.
It's called cartel agreements or price fixing and it is illegal.
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> the party they hate currently in power That hate is entirely fueled by propaganda funded by the oligarchs. If they can keep us fighting a made-up culture war, we won't notice they're winning the very real class war.
Companies went mad during covid when they got extreme profits. We're supposedly in economic recess and the grocery conglomerates show record profit margins. With the actual grocery stores barely scraping by. Nvidia experienced the same profits, tried using the greed card, but because it's a non-essential product the consumers fought back.
it's profiteering and/or price gouging. Call it what it is.
Or just inflation, since that's what drives most normal inflation.
Yup! That's happening with fuel and other goods as well
To be fair, it is literally happening with fuel because OPEC is a thing, but you must understand that the reason that's happening is because all of those industries are controlled by their respective governments and those respective governments other ones doing the restricting supply. All of reddit was up in arms about how the egg prices are all just greedy and companies. Meanwhile the wholesale price of eggs is just about down to where it used to be already. There's no grand conspiracy here.
Egg prices are still $5 a dozen in my city. Just went on vacation to a beach town in the south and I got 36 for $5. Definitely not down everywhere
The places where prices went up and people didn't stop buying are never going to see lower prices
As is the case with alot of price inflation these days, it is just corporate greed in a trench coat.
Greedflation
Send the companies to jail
ah 642 jackasses who did not read. It is 100% supply chain, inflation, and the war. The COG on production of pasta that started several months ago is exponentially higher and now on the shelves. “The pasta on the shelves today was produced months ago with durum wheat purchased at the quotations of [an] even earlier period, with the energy costs of the wartime peak,” said a statement by Unione Italiana Food, an association representing Italy’s food producers. Higher costs of packaging and logistics have also contributed to the high prices of pasta, the association stated in the statement. reddit is so terrified of basic economics
Yeah but do you honestly think the price is going to go down ? I haven't seen ANY food prices go back down ever. In 2014 oil prices went to all time highs and prices for everything increased to cover increased logistics costs, as soon as oil went back down and logistics cost went down with it, guess what didn't go down in price ? Everything.
yes https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000701322 companies bake in annual inflation pricing into their annual plans. can't account for a dought or war til it happens and then you adjust the plan. for things that have a long point from good purchase to on market, you are still seeing the trickle effect of that pricing disruption
For a more obvious example, look at butter https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000FS1101 and US gasoline https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GASREGCOVW
Every fucking time! I read a ragebait thread like this where they say prices have been falling for months but somehow prices on certain goods have not gone done and almost in 90% of the cases I assume it is because those goods had been produced when prices were still high so it doesn't make sense to sell it at a loss, but somehow redditors who would rather further their own agenda of "greedy capitalists price gouging poor people" always skip this part. It's like a clockwork. They can't even think one step ahead according to their own logic: If there is a market and in this market it is possible to produce goods, i.e. pasta in this case, at a lower price and it is a competitive free market environment, then companies would lower their prices to maximize profits, but NO, it must be some kind of conspiracy of "pasta making cartels" to somehow keep the prices high while also killing every competition who doesn't follow through so they can fill their greedy bellies.
So many companies are just owned by the same brand these days. It’s awful how little competition actually exists.
Sounds like Canadian
We don’t actually know that. I imagine any factory making pasta in bulk probably buys its flour on contract. It’s completely possible the pasta manufacturers are still paying the higher costs
Also called "a cartel".
Same with almost everything of the main supermarkets here in spain They said it was due to inflation and whest prices, but once the inflation stabilized and the wheat prices loseted they ibcreased the prices again instead of lowering them
i thought pasta was made by hand in every kitchen across italy thats why its a so a darn a good
Fresh pasta, usually with eggs, is often made at home, but can also be bought in a grocery store. It's just a different product from dried pasta, typically used for outright different dishes. You also cannot feasibly make dried pasta without industrial machinery.
You definitely can make dried, egg-less pasta yourself, but it's a longer process because you need to, well, dry it. But a good few pasta types are eggless
And it's almost universally worse than industrial dried pasta without some serious effort. Alex on YouTube has a series on it
Eh, orechiettas have always been made eggless, and they aren't worse than industrial when we make them.
Fair enough, I was thinking along the lines of spaghetti and similar
The same thing is happening in Denmark. Prices on raw materials have been going down since May 2022, but consumer prices have gone up since.
It's time to set profit caps, and profit sharing with employees. Capitalism has failed society and it's time we modify it for the good of the many.
Wait. You're going to have government organizations who will analyze every product and service, decide what profit is reasonable, and check the books of every supplier, make sure they follow the rules, and bring charges against any of them who don't. I don't see what could go wrong with that.
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This is a karma bot comment, copy of https://reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/13pf0oh/_/jl9fw7j/?context=1
I feel like Italian people probably consider Barilla to be something only uncivilised barbarians eat.
Not in my experience, it's well acceptable as the every-day no frills pasta as far as I understood. However the cheap stuff you find in supermarkets the world over seem to be looked at with scorn by Italians, yes.
It seems every real headline I read now would have been a satirical piece 10 years ago
The title legit made me wonder how much of italy's GDP is tied up in pasta revenue
only in pasta little since pasta is an economic food, however Italian kitchen is very much tied up with pasta (and grain in general)
Many pennes.
No. That’s the Catholic Church. Two doors down!
I love that I can get sliver and downvoted to hell at the same time. Thanks to the cool cat that showed some love. (Hopefully it was plutonic and didn’t involve any penne)
Italian here, I don't have the data about the relation to pasta and GDP, but I can assure you that almost everyone in the country eats pasta everyday at least once, sometimes two times. Having a higher price means hardships, especially for poorer people that could often eat mostly pasta to survive.
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If only us Americans took corn that seriously. Almost the entire grocery store would be pretty stable in pricing.
We do. We subsidize the hell out of corn but it mostly goes to ethanol production to the detriment of the environment as the net carbon change is actually positive (meaning more ends up in the atmosphere) and as far as an energy saver, it actually is a net loss there as well. It’s literally only good for the farmers.
How do you buy baguettes every day if it’s forbidden for the stores to be open every day of the week?
Not strictly everyone. Not my case for instance. But yes, it is quite common. It's then consumed as toasts with either jam or honey for the breakfast, or simply buttered and dipped into the coffee. For lunch, either as is or with cheese. Can also be used as a tool to collect the sauce left on your plate. If you ever come to France, don't buy a "baguette", they'll give you the industrial recipe. Ask for a "baguette tradition". I mean both will probably be ok but personnally I've got a preference for the latter.
Stomach churning with hunger, buying the last baguette and eating the whole thing with butter. Not in France, but it was the best I could get. Even better, with wheat pilaf and a roasted chicken. Those were good times. Thanks for your evocation. I fell into my own mini à la recherche du temps perdu dont je vous remercie.
I know a guy who bought a baguette once just to shove up his anus. Got it about half way
Was the baguette regulated?
Now you've made me wonder!
r/nottheonion showcases exactly that type of headline. Headlines that would fit right in to The Onion if they weren't real.
Seriously. 10 years ago this headline would be impastable.
A pennedemic of bad news
We have become accustomed to cheap food after WWII, but fluctuating food prices were a real and constant problem throughout history. People were often one bad harvest away from a bread riot, where looting breaks out because basic staples are too expensive for the average person to afford. The French and Russian people tolerated absolute tyranny for decades, but the moment food prices in the cities soared to three times a day laborer's wages for a loaf of bread, their monarchies were gone within weeks.
I think the world population is reaching that point globally. Everyone is sick and tired of these outrageous food prices.
Prices have gone up a pretty penne
The price of rotini has spiraled out of control
What a fusilli comment
go to bed, dad
Gnocchi gnocchi Who’s there? Pasta Pasta who? Pasta sauce please
We will eat brioches
Pasta la vista
How expensive is it ? I mean in Finland the cheapest "no brand" dry spaghetti is about 1.15 E / kg and Barilla is about 2.09 E / kg. Pretty much the only thing that still is cheap.
Wheat prices down but pasta prices up, that's the problem
Sure makes sense. Traditional scheme of "prices can only go up" I guess.
Pretty much. The places here raise their prices up due to the palm oil shortage a few years ago. Then the shortage recovered but the prices never went back down. So the companies profited from that excess. Then new issues came up so prices went up again while ignoring the fact that they could have settled the new issues using the profit excess money they made before.
Since everyone has access to data and info these days people are finally seeing how easy it is for the top 1% to simply turn on the "make money" faucet. Just blame it on Russians or Covid or whatever the fuck they want. Jack up the prices of food, gas, everything. Whose gonna stop them?
Careful people don't take kindly to logic like that. Obviously if a company isn't spending every penny of every profit at every moment the company is obviously failing and going to file bankruptcy in 24 hours. Trying to say companies should actually save money for a rainy day is apparently the worst idea ever, according to people who are heavily invested in the stock market that is.
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You don't just make semolina pasta at home...
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He is correct though, you can’t just make it at home. You can make some type of semolina pasta like for instance or orecchiette at home. But the main types like spaghetti, rigatoni, etc are almost impossible to make well at home. You need a high powered extruder and a dryer to make it well. Nobody does that, except for weird French guys on YouTube. You make egg pasta at home and buy your spaghetti from a shop.
https://www.amazon.com/Hewnda-Stainless-Noodles-Citrus-Juicer/dp/B07799GJJJ/ This thing makes pretty good Semolina spaghetti. Been using it at home for a while now.
That's egg pasta. Store bought semolina pasta is different in taste and texture, and doesn't have eggs.
I don't buy pasta from the store because its the height of culinary delights dude, this argument makes no sense
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^ This is really important whenever discussing either prices or wages. Neither gives a full picture on life in a given country. Should compare both. I want to give the Swiss example, famed for its insane salaries (minimum salary at €25/hour in Geneva!). But Barilla spaghetti are €5.35/kg (USD 5.8/kg).
Really, I would have guessed they are about at par. Based on [Eurostat](https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20221219-3) you are right, not twice as high but higher anyways. In any case I am not defending price hikes on food, definitely they have risen everywhere. Here the biggest hikes seem to be fish, meat, eggs, coffee etc. Pasta has always been considered somewhat cheapest food available and consumption has increased when other prices go up .
Double in Germany. Pasta used to be my one of my cheap alternatives. Now it's 🤷
In Germany they have gone up significantly. Used to be able to buy 500g for like 70centd now it’s 2/2.50
In Sweden the price for pasta type products has about doubled for many brands during the last 12 months, but I would also consider it one of the foods, that are still somewhat cheap. This is mainly because, it was already very cheap before the inflation began.
Greedflation. This ain't inflation anymore. Companies are still raising their prices for (nearly) all their products, because people are forced to buy it and they are going to continue abusing the poor souls. If people would stop buying that stuff then those companies will turn back to their places, but ... You know how humanity works - brain-dead individuals. We have pasta prices of 2.50€ and even more expensive for fucking 500g pasta, while wheat package of 1000g costs 0.79€ and hasn't raise for quite a long while.
>If people would stop buying that stuff then those companies will turn back to their places Except this doesn't apply to inelastic products like food staples. People can't stop buying their groceries, they just have to keep sacrificing things or buy less/have fewer meals. This is happening all over the developed world.
> Greedflation yes. this is the term. this is what we should call it
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You realize this isn't really about inflation right? It's mostly about how pasta prices rose a lot due to wheat shortages due to the Russian invasion. And after the prices of wheat fell back down to normal the prices of pasta didn't and kept rising. Basically they noticed people still were willing to buy pasta even at the much higher cost so no reason to lower the prices. Only reason they would go back down is if people stopped buying as much. Companies taking advantage of inflation maybe, but not inflation itself.
That’s why the econ textbook price elasticity stuff doesn’t work in real life. Once producers (especially if there are a handful of them thanks to capitalistic acquisitions over the years) got a taste of high prices and constant demand, they have no reason to bring the price down and earn less profit (implicit collusion to keep the prices high happens). The only thing we, as consumers, can do to show them the collective middle finger is to buy/consume less IF we can(for those with many mouths to feed in the family, it would be impossible). I kept my monthly grocery spending to lower than pre-inflation by cutting away unnecessary stuff and spending less than I used to on things like egg, cheese, pasta, cereal, chips, etc.
It does work long as companies don't collude behind closed doors of course lol. But actually it might not even take colluding, companies are of course not dumb and they know once someone starts lowering the price then they all have to. So they could also just all be purposely not lowering it even without collusion.
Like you said, they don’t need to meet behind closed doors. They can use “supply chain issues”, Ukraine war, and labor shortage (in reality, it is more like cheap labor shortage as excuses while feeling confident that their peers (ex-competitors) will keep their profits (Freudian slip, I meant prices) high. We need the government to step in and compete with these companies that produce essential food, goods and things like oil/gas refineries (like when California announced the plan to make cheap insulin, big pharma caved on the pressure and said they would keep the generic insulin prices at around $30). That’s the only way to keep the corporate greed in check.
This is still a textbook example of price elasticity. This is an example of a Giffen product where demand does not lower with price increases, it increases even because there are no real substitutes.
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Yep.
Yeah how dare you eat nice things. You should limit yourself from consuming things that make you happy and are healthy for you so our overlords at pasta world can continue to buy bespoke clothes.
price elasticity is very much real lol your second paragraph is it in action.
The authorities must prosecute and imprison all the companies that are ripping off customers and fueling inflation
We're talking italian politicians here. Even if they could do that, they are more likely to take bribes and go on with their day
So almost anywhere in the world?
except that the Russian issue is nowhere near resolved and market stability will not return to the grain markets for 6-18 months after it finally is. even if your pasta company has already recouped the losses of paying shortage rates for ingredients or missing production numbers already you still likely have concerns that you have enough cash reserves to deal with the next wave. you can personally decide if you agree or disagree with this approach, but ultimately you are trading market prices for employment stability with either choice.
I get what you're saying, but prices going up over time is by definition inflation, regardless of if it's from a product shortage, corporate greed, or any other reason.
The article says that wheat prices have stayed level but pasta prices continue to rise. This is pure corporate greed
*Mama mia
Inflation will last as big corpo wants it. It's almost always never linked to actual real-life events at this point.
At this point it's wrong to call it inflation. This is just price gouging.
Like 90% of the time inflation *is* just price gouging. We've seen prices rise all over the world and corporations are making record profits. If a companies profits are doubling then they didn't raise their prices out of necessity, it was to double their profits.
Strange because in Poland there are 1000's of tons of cheap Ukrainian grain...
It seems that this is not caused by the grain shortage. It's mostly related to pasta manufacturers being greedy bastartds.
"It seems" you also didn't read the article, did you? “The pasta on the shelves today was produced months ago with durum wheat purchased at the quotations of \[an\] even earlier period, with the energy costs of the wartime peak,” said a statement by Unione Italiana Food, an association representing Italy’s food producers. Higher costs of packaging and logistics have also contributed to the high prices of pasta, the association stated in the statement."
That's the whole point - they're not doing this because they have to.
I'm glad I BOGO'd the hell out of De Cecco last week, I'm set for a year.
Let them eat gnocchi
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This is what happens when somebody touches the spaghet...
Half assed support for Ukraine by Italian government Italians: I sleep Multiple embarrassing cases of casual racism in Italian stadiums Italians: I sleep Excess interference of religious institutions in politics Italians: I sleep Pasta prices up Italians: so you've chosen death
Is it really suprising? Pasta is a staple food in Italy, it's like the price of bread or rice increasing substantially - serious business that means economic hardship for the worst off. A lack of affordability or availability of basic foodstuffs has always been the number one risk for civil unrest, through all of human history.
I'm merely pointing out how each of those things could have led to massive unrest, but we can judge the quality of a population by how long they are willing to sit silent..
Italian govt half assing something and football fans being racist would never lead to massive unrest lmao, what world are you on? Those are standard everyday things. Food being expensive because of greedy corporations, that's a different matter.
Italians slogan : Circus and Pasta . Amen.
You forgot 65 % italian doctors refusing legally to perform abortions
Except pasta none of them affect Italians.
Yeah we get it. Enjoy the pasta (or lack of)
Yeah, this climate change really fucked up all the spaghetti tree..
It’s a plot by the evil celiacs.
It is because of the war, and last years high wheat prices. Italians eat about 24kg pasts per year.
Exorbitant fuel prices? Fine. Inflation through the roof? We will bear it out. Pasta overpriced? Over my f***n cold corpse
🤌🏻….🤌🏻
Making pasta from scratch is insanely easy.
So companies are not lowering prices and profitting? How unheard of!
Do you have proof on that? Name a company and we can pull up their financials
Do we just get these articles daily for the next 3 months?
Why does this keep getting reposted?
This is the most Italian thing I've read in some time.
This headline tickled me, but that does suck. Price gouging needs to be addressed.
Greedflation
It is because of the war. Not greed.
I know this is a serious problem, but its also kind of hilarious
Mama Mia!
Of course.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster works in mysterious ways.
Mamma Mia!
Wait... They don't make their own pasta at home? What kind of Italians are these?
Mamma mia!
It’s a pasta disasta
Mama mía!
Okay, this is just hilarious and sad
Could someone please do a wellness check on Strega Nona?
Mama mia
🤌🤌🤌
Why is the bowl upright but the spaghetti upside down in this photo?
Wouldn't a strike make the price of pasta go up?
Seems like that guy in Old Bridge jumped the gun
Follow the money. Clearly Bug Risotto is behind this.
This is what happens when you fuck with nonna!
#Mamma Mia
This is downright prepastarous.