Retail Giants Have Found A Way To Keep Food Prices High Forever

The cost of groceries in America is out of control, and a new report says the prices can no longer be blamed on inflation or supply chain issues – Its all due to corporate greed. Grocery store chains used the pandemic to raise prices on everything, and those higher prices appear to be here to stay. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

Link - https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/food-corps-blame-high-prices

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

The cost of groceries in America is out of control and a new report says the prices can no longer be blamed on inflation or supply chain issues. It's all due to corporate greed. Grocery store chains used the pandemic to raise prices on everything and those higher prices are here to stay. Now what's so interesting about this, when I was reading this story, I thought about you because you were doing some of the first stories, I remember when we were saying, these prices go crazy, where you said, this is here to stay. They've used the pandemic as this big fraud and they're here to stay. Pick the story up for me, because you were early on in this story. I remember that.
Yeah. And listen, we had that period of super high inflation when we had the supply chain issues. So yeah, that was market trying to fix itself and it never does a good job of it. And while that happens, while inflation hits 10% on prices, the corporations come in and say, okay, well we gotta raise 'em 10%, but what if we raise 'em 20%? Because eventually that first 10% from inflation does go away. But that second 10% never does. That becomes the new base price. So they, the corporations that do this, their profits are already up that 10% on every good. But consumers think, oh, well the price came down because it was $3 last week, but now it's $2 and 70 cents. Well, it should be $2. You're getting screwed out of that extra 70 cents.
They learned from the healthcare story, didn't they?
Yep.
They learned from the healthcare story. And now we're seeing grocery prizes five times the inflation rate, where you've got families that are working two or three jobs and the White House could do something about it. You can have price control mandates. But really, the economists are saying, it's basically, it is some activity by the corporations, but we have an inflation problem that's here to stay, period, until something dramatic happens. Add that, this greed, I don't know how people even buy eggs and milk anymore. It's that bad.
Right. If it were just inflation, that would be difficult enough, but it would be manageable to a degree. With that price gouging that's coming on top of that, that as you said, is far more than inflation could ever dream of being, that's what's really killing these people because we know these grocery store CEOs every year, they're pocketing tens of millions of dollars because we're doing such a good job of making sure this single mother can't feed her kids because we're stealing extra money from her, for her eggs and milk.
How about the argument where you hear 'em, well, if we can get bigger? Okay. If Walmart or whoever, if we can just get bigger and more of a conglomerate, we can pass the savings onto you. That story. You hear that all the time. It's nonsense. It's just ridiculous. It sounds good. Yeah, they get bigger. Gee, I guess the economy of scale, they can give us better prices, right. Just the opposite is taking place.
Well, and it used to be, you had your, typically in a state you would have your grocery stores that you wouldn't see in any other state. Publix originally was only a Florida thing. Now it's all over the country. Same thing with Kroger's or Albertsons, which I think those two have now merged.
Right.
You used to have your Winn-Dixie's and your Food Worlds and all these options and slowly they've all been consolidated. So that's all you see. It's homogenous across huge swaths of the country because we don't have your little local grocers anymore.