I mean, that’s 4 years of our lives taken! 4 years of opportunities that were more challenging because they wanted a number on a computer to go up! 4 years of feeling worse than necessary about my finances and management of them and general personhood because i felt like i couldn’t afford anything because everything was priced egregiously!
And now they’re saying ‘oh well we fixed it now’. Fuck you!!! Get over yourselves! Holy shit, I can’t wait to happily be friends with the giant corporations again!! Just the arrogance that we’re happy to once again be at their beck and call because they changed the numbers they could’ve always changed. Sickening.
And I feel like I have a brain disease because i’ve been worrying and posting for years about how disgusting it is that they’re just cranking the numbers up to see what’ll happen and obviously no one will stop them because this is an oligarchy — and i kept getting well-ackshullyied into the ground by esteemed logical posters explaining how supply chains work. Well look at this shit you motherfuckers!
Just the amount of incredibly deep and sophisticated social engineering is so disgusting:
It’s a savvy play for shifting perceptions of value, crucial for consumers in the decision-making process of where to shop for bread and eggs. Customers benefit by saving some money; retailers possibly benefit even more by being known as the company that magnanimously trimmed prices.
Go to hell, stop shifting my value perception. I should be able to decide what I feel about milk or zucchini. When I think about a croissant I should be thinking about France, not Target pricing strategies.
Most importantly, the theater of making grand pronouncements about lower prices is great for retailers’ reputations. Forget about all the price hikes grocery retailers and food brands implemented in the last few years — now companies would like consumers to focus on the savings they’re offering. “They’re all leaning into this inflation-oriented messaging,” says Stambor, which he notes is interesting because food inflation isn’t high at the moment. It’s the accumulation of past inflation that we’re still feeling the sting of; the prices just didn’t come down.
And we’re meant to thank them for this! I hope to god they can’t put the genie back in the bottle with this. I won’t forget 2020, I’ll hate these bloodsuckers til the day I die.
So the “free market” has been so consolidated into large mega-corps that they just price fix now without fear of punishment because they’re too big to fail or have such deep pockets that they own the political landscape.
Free market just means free to squeeze the remaining middle class until there’s nothing left.
It used to be that only the telecoms and tech companies were consolidated enough to pricefix, now every sector is, and the economy is spiraling downward at record pace.
The saddest part is that they're choosing this. The richest know that they could be paying thriving wages, and get even richer. They know that they could create co-op monopolies and get even richer. They aren't going for a high score on wealth. They've seen the future, and are going for a high score on human suffering and death, because it won't be possible ever again once the rich are overthrown and we create sensible distribution methods that don't allow one person to hoard hundreds of millions of people's worth of resources.
It was always about removing any intervention by the powers of the state (which in Democracy are controlled by voters) so that the positive feedback loops in money aggregation in most markets (basically any market with barriers to entry isn't free, especially if that barrier relates to land ownership, so the more money you make, the more you own, the more money you make) would turn those people who started with the most money - as in a system with such feedback loops in place, starting advantages such as being born rich are unassailable - into oligarchs.
As that system polls wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer, of course it will eventually destroy the middle class and countries ends up looking a lot like dictatorship Brazil in the 70s - only two classes, rich and poor and pretty much nothing in the middle.