Many of those are the same. Pizza dough : once a month take 30 minutes preparing 10 rolls and in the freezer.

And as a bonus, less chemicals in your system.

Nah, it's just that the comment you're responding to is being insufferably pedantic. Your colloquial use of "chemicals" here is perfectly well understood.

We all understood the first time.

BTW, interestingly in a previous life I studied chemistry... Only always in French

Link to the scene: https://youtu.be/Nl_Qyk9DSUw

Can't seem to find it - but some time ago there was a short vid on why the price of bananas world wide was a good litmus on the shipping/economic trade - it went into detail on how banana prices could be used to measure certain stress points in global trade... I cant seem to find it though.

However, in looking for it I found this, which is kind of interesting:

>>"Are there more international laws on the trade of bananas than conventional weapons, like AK-47s?"

>>"The short answer is astonishingly, yes. The global trade in bananas or banana plants is governed by at least three binding global agreements and the non-binding, though strictly adhered to, Codex food code. The arms trade is not governed by any binding global agreements."

-

https://politicsofpoverty.oxfamamerica.org/comparing-bananas...

Jeff Bezos was interviewed in Pay Pal days after making many millions, and as they drove across the GGB, was asked why he was still driving his beat up honda - he said "Why, just because I have some money? Its still a good car!"

FF 2020: Jeff Bezos builds worlds most expensive yacht, and is having a municiple bridge dismantled so it can pass through, and local residents want to throw eggs at it as it passes by!

As someone from the country you're referring to: this is an internet meme... The bridge that was dismantled is meant to be dismantled for such a thing.

Jeff Bezos did not and also cannot order bridges to be dismantled.

My family was poor growing up and we shopped by cent per oz, and noticed any significant price changes and went for alternatives.

Planned dinner/produce/meat based off what was on sale, etc.

Many, many people notice when milk goes up 50 cents. I still do.

But I recently stopped buying in corner shops because their prices are usually close to 50% higher than in large supermarkets and with food inflation it makes a difference in my budget.

HOWEVER.

Annecdote:

I was at dinner in SF - and we were at a very nice restaurant, nice wine, food etc. My buddy was kvetching over buying this watch, which was something like $200 and was talking about how he wasnt sure if it was worth it...

I looked at him and said "We are spending over $200 on this bottle of wine tonight without blinking, which will be gone in moments - and youre kvetching over a $200 watch which will be around forever?"

Expense-perspective is something to reflect on.

You have to do this in the cereal aisle! All the different-sized boxes of the same exact cereal have wildly different price-per-weight. And the largest-sized box is rarely the cheapest-per-weight!

what surprised me is how expensive plain Cheerios have become. My wife explained it as if I were stupid - they are mostly whole grains and very little garbage. All the other cereals have so much crap in them that the input price hasn't increased as much.

It has been like this for years. It is not just cheaper by unit, the whole box is just straight cheaper, but I can only assume people do not want to bend down? Even the prices are clearly visible from standing position.

Expenses across the board have skyrocketed in the past year. Try and read some stories about what people living in colder, rural areas in Northern Europe (Scotland, Scandinavia, etc.) have had to deal with and you would start to get an idea.

If your rent suddenly increased by 30%, and winter heating bill tripled since last year and food costs 25% more than a year ago, then a lot of people with normally sufficient income would be having financial issues.

While I wouldn't accuse you of showing "extreme privilege" for not noticing a $3 price increase... good on you for not needing to worry about that... I'm tempted to accuse you of it for thinking it's only the poor that would. That's a pretty glaring disconnect.

Do you not even look at your phone/credit card when you tap? Do you really just randomly pay things?

There were several years early in my childhood where macaroni and cheese was one of the main courses in family meals, because we didn't have much money. This was until my parents worked multiple jobs and promoted their way into respectable wealth - hearing my friend make that comment really stuck with me and I laugh whenever I'm reminded of it, like today.

Anyway, I agree with you totally. The OP comment doesn't seem like a normal thing for people to say and is rather tone deaf IMO. I could make ten times more than what I do now and would still notice yogurt being 80% more in our grocery. Luckily for me I don't have to budget when it comes to groceries, but I'm well aware of how much pain some people/families must be going through.

I don't care, really, whether the box of macaroni and cheese I buy is $0.35 or $1.69. But I'll tend to buy the cheaper, just because I don't want to contribute to the success of the higher price point. It's my fight for the common man.

All my efforts are completely negated when my wife goes shopping :(

It seems these days we're ambivalent toward the production of stuff, or even antagonistic to it in many cases. So we have less stuff. Combine this with giving people more money and you get inflation.

I cannot emphasize this enough. Wealthy Western nations have been wealthy for so long that people know how to cut up the pie in different sizes more so than they know how to bake more.

Besides, even if we're generous and say that half of California is too mountainous to live in and another quarter is too desert-y to live in, leaving only a quarter of the state's area suitable for habitation, that leaves roughly 40 million people living in roughly 40,000 square miles, or about a thousand heads per square mile. That's comparable to Israel or Belgium in terms of population density, and certainly not as though people are packing into Kowloon.

https://noparkinghere.com/

A city in Japan would build new dense neighborhoods and a new commuter rail line to serve them. A city in California would refuse to build new homes nearby, so people are forced to live in a far-away suburb and commute 2 hours by car. Then Californians complain about increasing traffic congestion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ImTheMainCharacter/comments/11aqayg...

Japanese people are NOTHING like Americans. Stop saying CA should build like Japan unless you're willing to kick out the loud assholes.

People seem to think inflation is temporary but it seems much more stubborn and central banks are very scared of it, hence rate rises when the banks might collapse.

You might say there's then an incentive to undercut, sure, but if you undercut too much you'll be left with no inventory as the rest of the manufacturers decide on fixed prices as a cartel (which has now become the norm in most industries). The trust busting has been nowhere to be seen in the last decades and the results are in.

Price gouging usually leads to producing more stuff, if it goes on long enough and you are allowed to produce more.

Healthcare is an example where this doesn't work, because you aren't allowed to produce more stuff. You can gouge all you want, but can't provide any additional quantity of services. (See: Certificate of Need laws in the US)

If the providers of those necessities possess a monopoly, either natural or through regulatory capture, humans will pay whatever they have to get those necessities. It is important for social prosperity to prevent extracting excess profits through monopolisation, either by destroying the monopoly or by taxing it and reducing other taxes on the individuals.

If they doubled the price consistently, they would no longer be a low margin business. The fact that they are low margin is evidence that they are not gouging.

I think there's also a misperception of the public on a lot of items. Many of the dramatic price increases we see are deferred inflation from not raising prices (and subsequently eating the added supplier cost). We generally don't see steady 2-5% price increases every year, but rather large step increases every few years. Many of those step increases are catching up for the previous years where there was no increase.

FWIW, I'm not saying there isn't opportunism going on, but it's much less likely in low-margin commodity businesses.

For example, just enabling additional supply can create second order effects in terms of perverse incentives to overproduce creating all sorts of knock-on effects. We can stimulate the supply of corn and end up with distorted food markets and high-fructose corn syrup as a near-ubiquitous food additive. All I’m saying is we need to be mindful of these systemic effects and creating a false dichotomy tends to turn a blind eye towards them.

Any mechanism with the explicit intent to increase supply is tantamount to a subsidy. Tax breaks are an informal “subsidy” to spur business, with a cost incurred by other societal goals. Decreasing environmental regulations are an informal subsidy to increase energy production with externalities borne by others. Etc etc. The broader point is that defining the utility function that captures these societal costs/benefits is complex and your false dichotomy misses all that nuance.

We should not equate rent seeking and genuine innovation as the same things.

Making billionaires more wealthy doesn't affect inflation much because they are already consuming as much as they want. That money will just increase the price of stocks and bonds - whatever billionaires invest in.

Giving every average Joe a thousand more dollars will increase spending by nearly that amount per person and prices of goods will increase.

Giving money to people who need money is part of the solution, but the biggest part of the solution is making sure human productivity (GDP) is going to make things that make people's lives better.

https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/11zwtif/annual_infl...

Like you pay £1.5 for essential product if you scan a card otherwise it is £3.

These should be made illegal.

People on modest salaries either don't spot the cheaper, just-as-good toothpaste that's not as prominent, they think that it's not as good as the ones with lists of all the great things they're supposed to do, or they aren't feeling the squeeze enough to seek it out.

If you drop into an independent chemist you might notice that sometimes the only toothpaste they stock is the 'basic' one, because their customers are price-sensitive, so that's all they'll buy.

Going rate for pizza is around 60p/100g, with a larger than average Aldi 'Meat Feast' pizza coming in at £2.19, which is 39p/100g.

Again, if you're on a 'modest salary', you pick the cheaper products or pick the supermarkets which only really sell the cheaper products.

I'm not saying that prices aren't going up, just that closer to the 'survival' line, there is much less room to increase prices, because people aren't at the point of choosing based on preference, so you can't rely on them switching to a slightly cheaper option from your artificially differentiated product line (yes, you, Colgate-Palmolive). They'll just be forced to stop buying your products altogether.

Going from 125mL to 100mL for the same price => 20% price inflation.

For what is essentially just a mild abrasive plus fluoride, the baffling array of variations on a theme on display, mostly from the same few fmcg conglomerates anyway, is just ridiculous.

I took up cooking from scratch as a hobby a couple of decades ago. I highly recommend it.

After a bit of a learning curve, it's cheaper, tastier. and better for you than highly processed foodlike substances.

Firstly cooking from scratch is absolutely a life skill and nominally cheaper.

But food is also a class issue. Those with time to spare (ie rich) can indulge in for example "stuffing a mushroom" - Shirley Conran famously recanted twenty years of writing cookery lifestyle books exhorting women to become corden bleu cooks by saying life was to short to stuff a mushroom - and that is kind of my point.

I mean Gordon bloody Ramsey does not prepare food the way he tells you to in his cookbooks - it's too slow and inefficient.

All the recipies I love to cook - getting the temperature of the linguini just right before pouring over eggs and pecorino for carbonara for instance - is frankly, a nightmare nutrition wise (even if it's a hit kid wise) and a plate of chicken breast and five different veg and fruit for after is waaaay better - but how many recipients books will do that, how many blog posts extoll boiled peas.

Maybe we would learn from the staff of life - Bread. In the first weeks of lockdown, flour vanished from shelves - obviously because of a shortage but mostly because flour was diverted from domestic use to go to actual bakers and factories who could efficiently mass produce the staple of life that was then shipped to our supermarket shelves to eat. Yes there were bakers running triple shifts, logistic planners sleeping in the office and HVV drivers going every which way. But in the end feeding millions is like Gorden Ramsey says - if you do it like the instagram post says, you are doing it wrong

I recommend you start with an instant pot. You can go from dried legumes to the table in very little time.

> But food is also a class issue.

If we put these two beliefs together (and I think we're of similar minds), I think we should amend the first to be "meal planning is a life skill". Unfortunately the cooking craze over the past few decades has done nothing to improve, let alone restore, that life skill.

> I mean Gordon bloody Ramsey does not prepare food the way he tells you to in his cookbooks - it's too slow and inefficient.

Here I disagree. Someone like Gordon Ramsey possesses incredible knife and other preparatory and cooking skills. To use an analogy, he may not run a sub 4 minute mile every time he goes for a run, but even his leisurely runs would exhibit abilities that would seem extraordinary yet appear effortless on his part to most people.

That said, as a successful restaurateur Ramsey likely has meal planning skills at least as impeccable as his culinary skills. And meal planning is the most critical aspect to successful, economical home cooking. People seem to think the reason for failure is difficulty in preparation and cooking, thus the popularity of slow cookers, instant pots, etc. But such gadgets address the wrong set of problems. (The emphasis on recipes is misplaced for similar reasons.)

FWIW, I have horrible meal planning skills. Developing a good sense for how to mix and match ingredients is one important aspect; among other reasons, so you can reuse ingredients across multiple meals in a week. Relatedly, learning specific styles of cuisines and their rules also helps--French, Spanish, and Italian cooking all commonly use what in Spanish-influenced cuisine is called a sofrito. But there are many other dimensions to meal planning.

On that note, anyone know of good meal planning books or resources?

I also recommend starting to put your favourite recipes into a recipe app (I use Paprika, available on most platforms). Even add simple stuff like Yogurt and Fruit Breakfast. Then you can use the app's built-in meal planner and grocery list generator.

oBViOUSLy tHE rUSsIANs dID it ;p

The only reason some companies are able to get away with this is because too many people shop mindlessly without checking prices.

The solution is for everyone to pay attention to prices when we shop: the brands who jump their prices up will have 0 customers.

I'm not saying it's easy, and perhaps grocery store price labelling isn't maximally effective, but when we shop frugally, we actually benefit not only ourselves, but each other.