Comment on Inflation Outpaces Wage Growth For Over 40% Of Americans
Professorozone@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Maybe someone could explain to me how the short term inflation rate is 1.8%, but every tariff is at least 10%. I mean, in a country where nothing is made, which tariff free products are people buying? Is it just that many of the tariffs have not gone into effect yet? It’s so hard to keep track.
You pay 10% for the product when imported. However there are a lot of people, work and capital involved to transport the product and actually sell it to you.
Also a lot is also not imported, but made in the US. That is especially true for a lot of food, electricity, gasoline and even quite a bit of actual physical products.
Worth noting that tariffs are not charged on the retail price but on the cost of goods when imported. The 10% is on what Walmart pays their suppliers. Still increases prices, but not by as much.
I’m aware of this but usually companies will do anything to increase profits and pass that extra cost immediately on to the consumer to plus a little extra for them.
Snowclone@lemmy.world 1 week ago
it depends a lot on the business model. but like a lot of qualified people have been pointing out, places like Wal-Mart can weather the losses considering a story will make up to a 1-3million a day, and they pay the 40 people who work there so little they quality for SNAP there’s a lot of cushion to absorb the costs. but no business with less than 15 employees is going to make it.
Professorozone@lemmy.world 1 week ago
But that’s not how capitalism works. If 70% of the items in Walmart have a 10% tariff, they raise 100% of the items 20%. Especially Walmart. But I guess I’m wrong.
Snowclone@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Unfortunately I have decades of experience in retail, and several years in pricing. Pricing has almost nothing to do with markup ratios alone. That’s not how it works. How it actually works is that they charge what people expect to, are conditioned to, or are willing to pay. So I sell you a $7,000 TV I’m lucky if I make $20 on the deal. If you buy 3 HDMI cables I just made $60 in profits. Clothes is even crazier, I’ll sell you any leather product at a loss but you buy a well made mixed fabric dress and that’s $40 against a total cost of $0.75, and that’s mostly shipping. Soft lines are an absolute beast. Then you have advanced fuckery. Walmart has a lot of money. If the textiles film Bangladesh get hit harder than the textiles film Indonesia, guess who can afford to pay a shipping company based in Indonesia to forge paperwork and swap cargo in a third countries port without anyone in the US figuring it out for decade even if they cared to investigate and in the end they’re have to pay a find that will probably be less than the money saved from the tariff. Small businesses will die. Huge businesses will get bigger and more powerful. This was always the plan.
Professorozone@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Yup.
tmyakal@infosec.pub 1 week ago
Most companies have been taking it on the chin for now: eating the cost of the tariffs and taking a reduced profit to maintain prices and help foster consumer confidence while they wait and see how all the tariff negotiations actually play out.
With regards to the original question, inflation is measured across all consumer purchasing. So prices on goods (groceries, cars, computing hardware, etc) can increase significantly, but if the price on services (Netflix, restaurants, laundromats, etc) stays relatively flat, inflation ends up looking better than it feels.