dr jamesbicycleApr 21, 2024
Excuseflation.
Company that can get away with it tells everyone they need to raise prices.
Not bc costs have gone up, it's because they no competitors to challenge them &/or gov't hasn't regulated properly as public services.
Groceries, housing, transportation, telcom, post-sec educ, childcare...
#inflation #regulation #housing #homeless #childcare #education #telcom #excuseflation
Show threadCory DoctorowOct 4, 2023

This strains credulity. After all, the CEOs of giant companies in concentrated industries *openly boast* to their shareholders about how they've used the covid and Ukraine invasion shocks to hike prices to increase their profit margins - not just cover their additional costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/23/cant-make-an-omelet/#keep-calm-and-crack-on

While #excuseflation is new, open, naked price-fixing by industry cartels is not.

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Pluralistic: Eggflation is just more price-gouging (23 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowJun 14, 2023

This is especially true of the "buy box" that lands at the top of most searches. The company refuses to disclose how buy box positioning is determined, but 90% of products in the buy box pay for FBA.

Amazon has used #excuseflation to hike its FBA prices, blaming higher energy prices for price hikes that predated the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and blaming covid for price hikes that predated the pandemic.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMay 3, 2023

Covid let monopolistic grocers and consumer packaged goods manufacturers hike prices way beyond anything justified by supply-chain shocks and blame it on #inflation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

The oil companies got in on the #excuseflation act, too:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/15/sanctions-financing/#soak-the-rich

The energy sector was *especially* shameless in the UK, more than doubling the price of fuel:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/articles/costoflivinginsights/energy

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Pluralistic: Excuseflation (11 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

CheshireApr 28, 2023
Britain once rioted over the price of bread. What would it take for us to confront greedflation today?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/28/british-bread-greedflation-profiteering-poor?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other
#AndyBeckett
#Greedflation
#Excuseflation
Britain once rioted over the price of bread. What would it take for us to confront greedflation today?

We seem to wearily accept corporate profiteering as a fact of life. But an ever poorer public can be pushed only so far, says Guardian columnist Andy Beckett

The Guardian
Show threadCory DoctorowApr 3, 2023

Today, economism is helpless to do anything about #inflation, because it is ideologically incapable of recognizing the inflation is really #excuseflation, in which monopolists blame pandemic supply shocks, Russian military belligerence and supposedly overgenerous covid relief programs for their own greedy profiteering:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

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Pluralistic: Excuseflation (11 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Mathias ❄️🐺🐶 Mar 19, 2023

Fighting #greedflation #excuseflation #profiteering #PriceGouging is a tricky game these days. Multi-storing, watching sales carefully, using digital and mailed printed coupons, knowing store policies (e.g. Krog Make It Right). I'm privileged in being able to do so (energy, time, etc), and having five different major grocery store chains in drive distance. Nobody should be ripped off because they can't.

That said, I sure minmaxed this haul :3 Beat some pre-greedflation pricing, plus Amex 3% CB.

Steve Randy WaldmanMar 19, 2023
#excuseflation by @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/ ht The Arthurian https://econcrit.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-abcs-of-inflation.html
Pluralistic: Excuseflation (11 Mar 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Miguel Afonso CaetanoMar 11, 2023

#Economy #Economics ##Inflation #Excuseflation: "The decision to pass modest sums out to working people to prevent them from starving or losing their homes during the covid lockdowns made the right furious, especially inflation hawks who insist that any improvement in everyday people's material lives will transform America into an amateur revival of Weimar, complete with wheelbarrows full of useless bank-notes.
"Democrats" like Larry Summers – a Clintonite ghoul who is on record as saying that women are biologically incapable of doing science – insisted that preserving workers' living standards was a terrible mistake, only prolonging the inevitable day when they would be shoveled into the furnace that keeps The Economy running."

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power

Marin LukanovićMar 11, 2023
Love the #excuseflation by @pluralistic - there has been a lot of that in Europe as well. It has driven housing costs in Croatia through the roof, helped by hypertourism in coastal regions. Pure #greed.