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You're describing the poverty trap. Its very real. I'm wealthy now as well, but I remember a time when I took the subway 90 mins round trip to my job, and the fare cost almost an hour's pay. So I'd put in 9.5 hours to work an 8 hour shift and my takehome pay was for 7 hours.

Yeah, but the temptation to burn the place down is really smoldering.

To be fair, milk specifically should cost a lot more than it does because our dairy agricultural system is disgustingly abusive to cattle.

thats by design, its always on us.

capitalize the gains, socialize the losses.

They exist to support the rich. Low unemployment rates hurt the rich, so they retaliate by raising prices, making people poorer and more desperate and less able to dictate the conditions of their employment. And here we are.

Apparently, at least for groceries, there's an estimated extra $700/year increase next year, with food costs slowing to 2.5-4.5% increases in general, but sticking at 5-7% for bread, vegetables, and meat. It's still going to cost an average 4-person family $16.3k a year for groceries, though (AKA just over half a full-time minimum-wage salary, prior to paying taxes).

Metro reported a 14% increase in profits for their last quarter compared to last year, and Loblaw's 11%. According to Google's earning statements of the last year, Metro has made 27.4% more profits in the last four quarters than they reported in 2020. Loblaws, on the other hand, is actually down 12%, though Google reports they had two really bad quarters this year, and posted a 40% increase in profits between FY 2022 and 2020. So yeah, nothing as egregious as the article, but they're still outpacing (year over year for the last quarter) both regular and grocery inflation.

I'm sure if I really wanted to, I could dig up the same financial information for Soebys, but I have no clue if Walmart and Costco would keep clean financials readily available for Canada.

Chiming in from Australia, our two main supermarket chains (practically a combined monopoly) turned bumper profits over the last year while inflation has been out of control.

The only good news is one of the minor political parties is trying to push an inquiry into how they managed to make significantly higher than usual profits whilst customers are buying only the absolute essentials and farmers are saying that the price they get for groceries & meat hasnt gone up. However it is a minor party with some power, but not enough to force anything to happen without support from a major party and/or a lot of independants, so we will see how that goes

Not to mention "gouge".

Or predicting 7 out of the last 4 recessions

Correct, this is literally how market economics works. The real question is why they weren't able to do it before, since they had the incentive already (and always do).