I do the food shopping for the family, and I can attest to this personally: prices have been increasing for about a year now. More accurately, the per-unit prices have increased; the actual vendor’s product typically either has a higher sales price for the same amount of product as a year ago, or else offers less product in order to avoid ‘raising prices.’ I’m seeing more ‘price freeze’ promotions from supermarkets – which means that the supermarkets are just eating the increased costs themselves in order to keep their customer base.
This should not surprise anybody. We’re deliberately restricting energy production in this country, which inevitably leads to higher fuel prices, which inevitably leads to higher retail prices for everything that relies on fuel for transport*. We’re also subsidizing the conversion of perfectly good foodstock into a relatively inefficient fuel in order to placate Leftist religious fanatics, and never mind the implications for food prices at home and geopolitical stability abroad. Right now the major thing keeping this from being a major political headache is because our old – which is to say, pre-2007** – economic model was very, very good at keeping even our poor adequately fed by historical*** standards; we’re still coasting on that.
We might even be able to coast on it until the grown-ups get control back.
Moe Lane
Via Zero Hedge, via Instapundit.
Moe Lane
PS: If you’re wondering why we’re not seeing this reflected in inflation numbers, it’s because fuel and food prices are deemed too volatile on a month-to-month basis to be included in ‘core’ inflation rates. That is indeed an argument, but the media isn’t exactly jumping all over itself to note that over the long term both food and fuel prices are increasing, either (see here for example of how they are reporting the issue).
*Which is to say, everything.
**That would be when legislative control of Congress was transferred to a political group that thought that Nancy Pelosi was the perfect choice to lead them.
***To paraphrase (read: ‘steal from’) somebody or other, the single most frustrating thing about the modern Left is that they never read a history book that doesn’t have the word “People’s” somewhere in the title. Given that the objective of the people who write those sorts of books is to convince their readership that this is the worst moment in the history of Creation, well…
Excluding food and fuel from inflation calculations is ridiculous. You need to get past the cost of eating and getting to work before you can buy anything else.
Food/fuel really is volatile on the monthly level, though. Yearly is a different story.
Well, one other thing that’s also helped mitigate the food prices increases, to a point, is the ability of the big stores to take into account when their customers pay for food. WalMart, for example, has figured out that a LOT of customers with foodstamp cards will shop @12 midnight on the first of the month, and will stock bigger package items on that date. Then, around the end of the month, WalMart stocks smaller-package items that are cheaper.
And since WalMart is about, oh, 15% of total grocery sales by itself, it’s not too hard to figure out that the Safeways, the Albertsons, the Krogers, etc, are also doing it.
I find it rather ominous that over the last couple of months, there’s been a lot of sales on beef, pork, and chicken. I know the poultry industry is taking it in the shorts, to the extent that the USDA just stepped in and bought $40 million worth of cluckers for their surplus distribution program, but I have a bad feeling that this winter meat of all kinds is going to be really, really expensive – just like the last time we had unemployment on this scale.