Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Shrinkflation Is Not A Joke, It's Inflation

"Remembering" (AI-e collaboration)
If I am a baker and the cost of flour goes up, and the taxes on my bakery building go up, and the wages of my employees go up, it seems apparent that my prices would have to go up. 

If I own a cookie factory, and my taxes go up plus my costs for raw materials, and wages go up to keep my employees, I have very few options in order to break even. Option One: raise my prices. Option Two: reduce the number of cookies in the package, or... Option Three: reduce the size of the cookies in the package. This latter is what the president mockingly calls Shrinkflation.

President Biden seems to get a kick out of deriding businesses that make their products smaller. Does he not understand that it's GOVERNMENT POLICIES that are causing this? A business has to make a profit in order to pay for the cost of doing business. When businesses fail to make money, they eventually go out of business. Why this is not obvious to most people is a mystery to me. 

So the president brags about his policies making life better while things keep getting worse and people living in the trenches, down on the streets, know it. 

President Biden wants to have the FDA punish companies that reduce the number of chips in a bag or the size of cookies in a package. Which means what? The prices for these products will have to go up. 

When I go through the grocery story lines and buy four items for twenty or twenty-five dollars, I see people fork over $200 for a couple bags of groceries. I'm not sure how they can do it. Eventually it will be $200 for one bag of groceries. In short, this is another form of "shrinkflation" in which grocery stories give us fewer goods for the same amount of cash. Should we punish the grocers also?

*

Worth Reading (if able): Biden's Partisan State of Disunion

*

As Ronald Reagan famously observed, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." 

*

No comments:

Popular Posts