Comment on Shrinkflation is out of control

• BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Inflation drives all the numbers up. If money inflates to half the value but you maintain the same profit margins, you'll make record profits despite the finances having functionally remained exactly the same.

  Workers are also making record wages. It doesn't mean much if you don't consider how much the money is actually worth, as we've all been discovering over the last few years.

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  • variants@possumpat.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    so why not just lower the profit margins? also give me some of them record wages please, all I got was a bottle of champagne for all the work weve done and record profits but also raises in pay are frozen because of the turbulent times

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    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      so why not just lower the profit margins?

      Probably for the same reason you don't casually decide to go to your boss and say that you voluntarily want a pay cut.

      https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/wages

      Average hourly wage at the start of 2020 was $24. It's now $29, which comes to about $10,000 more each year, and is an increase of about 21%. That growth has been concentrated in the service industry, but the data is pretty clear regardless, and the general trend applies to basically all sectors. Inflation in that same time period is 18.1%, so it simply is a matter of fact that the average worker has greater buying power today than they did in January 2020.

      That's an average, of course, and may not necessarily apply to you individually.

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    • CaptObvious@literature.cafe ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You got champagne? All I got was runaround, brand new policies pulled out of thin air, and creative counting to deny seniority benefits. Turns out, I’ve worked for the same place 30 years when it inflates their retention and longevity numbers for the oversight agencies. I’ve also worked there for only a year (started a new position last year) when it suits them to deny a published benefit. The completely mindboggling part? These two countings were in the same email.

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    • jcit878@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      you got champagne? I just got lumped onto more projects for no more money

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  • grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Image

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  • DarkWasp@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Workers are not making record wages, maybe CEOs and the upper middle class are but nobody else is.

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    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Wage growth in the US has been most pronounced in the lower end of the market. Growth-oriented businesses like tech are a lot more sensitive to interest rate spikes, since their entire model is to borrow a ton of money to pay highly skilled workers a lot to "disrupt" an industry and achieve very rapid growth.

      That isn't necessarily contradictory with still struggling, since inflation exists. If you suddenly make 10% more money but everything costs 10% more as well, you are objectively making record wages, even though your buying power remains the same. Per that report, inflation-adjusted wages have actually grown on the lower end of the job market, so the average low-wage worker's buying power has actually increased, but general statistics don't always translate over to real-life experience super cleanly, and of course, a slight improvement from a bad financial situation doesn't suddenly put you in a good situation.

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    • Agent_of_Kayos@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I think that’s exactly it. I don’t know for sure, but these numbers may be average wages. And if that’s the case, having the top % or earners earn more while the bottome stays the same would still increase the average And would increase the divide between the top earners and bottom earners

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• SCB@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I work for a packaging supplier and inflation is hitting us hard.

  Perhaps the people whose job it is to know shit a actually do know shit

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  • drphungky@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m an inflationary economist and I feel you, man.

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  • DrQuint@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    People will just tell you “Ah, that’s the excuse they gave you to not raise you amt hing the inflation”.

    And we won’t and can’t know who’s right until we know who you work for and what’s their past and current financial output.

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    • SCB@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I know who is right because I’m not some bottom-tier employee. My job requires me to work with our finance team, M&A team, COO, and SG&A team as part of overarching strategy.

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• drphungky@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  This concept of greedflation has been disproved in recent meta-analysis. It should probably die. I’ll copy paste a comment I wrote in some other thread analyzing it.

  I think everyone should probably listen to this great report from NPR that dissects this issue. The Tl;dr: is greedflation is not really a real thing.

  The deeper answer to your question of, “can one party increase prices in a market?” is sort of basic economics, and the answer is, “Usually, no.” In a competitive market, the answer is no. In a monopolistic market (meaning one company controls most of the market, think like Google with browsers) with no government oversight, the answer is yes. Things get complicated when you add in government regulation or oligopolistic markets (markets where only a few players control the market). In those cases, it depends on how strong government regulations on price-gouging are and any anti-monopoly or anti-anticompetitive practice laws are, and also depends on how oligopolists behave. Sometimes, particularly in industries with few big players, the big players will make the same decisions independently. If they do this cooperating it will usually violate antitrust laws, but if they both decide they’ll be better off say, not paying workers as much, or charging super high markups, them that can happen. A lot of economic research shows that kind of “tacit collusion” happens in real life, like in the oil and gas industries. But other times oligopolies will behave very competitively, only uniting through lobbyist trade groups if at all (think Microsoft and Amazon in cloud software).

  So that’s the facts, but here’s my economic musing: The reason it feels like greedflation is a thing is a combination of factors:

  1. Inflation was very real, and very salient.
  2. Corporations (as mentioned in the NPR piece) crowed about their “record profits” in the short term, and also mention them when they are absolute record profits, not just record profit margins (something not mentioned but very real - a company can make twice as much money but also have spent twice as much, making way “more” money but with identical margins)
  3. In the US at least, we are seeing the highest numbers of industry consolidation and monopolies/oligopolies since the Gilded Age, so it feels like companies should be able to raise their prices if they want to.
  4. Media coverage and online spaces have become extremely polarized, so “corporations bad” is a very easy refrain to find if you’re watching or reading anything remotely left-wing, and it has been parroted by many democratic politicians as well, because it scores cheap and easy political points (also, and this is just my opinion, it helps vilify corps more in the public eye to help get more support for better antitrust legislation and enforcement, the actual end goal. I don’t think senators like Bernie Sanders don’t actually understand what’s going on with profit margins, I think they’re using it to generate political will, but that may be my own bias creeping in).

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• Agent_of_Kayos@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Huzzah for our current system of capitalism that insists a company is only doing good if each quarter has record profits. What’s bad with doing “good enough?”

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