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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • A lot of supermarkets like Kroger are particularly bad about pricing. They will stock stuff that barely anyone buys, lose money because the case goes bad long before it sells out, and waste space on super obscure goods, necessitating a larger floor plan. Then they take the cost of that and spread it over all the items that move regularly, pushing up prices for everyone.

    Why do they do this? Because it helps kill competition. If they didn’t have the obscure item, the one customer in a 1000 who wants it might go to a second store, and they might buy some of the quickly moving items there as well. By incentivizing shoppers to buy everything at one store, they are able to kill off smaller competitors that can’t afford to take losses or are unwilling to stock superfluous items.

    Aldi’s is a fairly good example of a store that doesn’t do this. They tend to avoid stocking products that won’t move quickly. Keeping the inventory, and thus floor plan, small saves them money and prevents them from having to spread costs over staple goods. This model is much more common in Europe, but in the US, particularly in suburbs where the density is super low, it easier for them to absorb all the local demand and thus push out smaller more affordable stores.



  • Even if the stores them selves end up having issues, or if most people choose to continue to go to private stores, the presence of a public option with competitive pricing will anchor prices at other stores.

    Specifically, I could see it undermining any attempt to implement software based price fixing among the private grocery stores, where they all use a common piece of software to “recommend prices”, with the software set up to increase prices at an even rate among all the clients so that none of them are undercutting each other. It should be illegal, but since technically no one at the companies are communicating about it, it falls in to a legal grey area. I haven’t heard about grocery stores doing this yet, but it’s been well documented in everything from real estate and renting to frozen potatoes.








  • It definitely is hilarious to see people legitimately considering backing Adams and Cuomo, both of who are well known to be profoundly corrupt and personally unpleasant people with no real plans to deal with issues that huge portions of the electorate are facing.

    Like, systematically, they have pushed out and disenfranchised anyone who has suggested anything but increasing the NYPD budgets. Suddenly a grass roots socialist candidate is the only one in the field with any real popular support.




  • China’s not exactly flush with cash to buy debt with at the moment, they’re having their own struggle party at the moment, although they tend to be less vocal about it. After all, their real estate market basically got massively over leveraged and a lot of capital disappeared and turned out wasted.

    The Saudi’s too are having a bit of a liquidity problem at the moment, they’ve made a lot of commitments on weird mega projects and spent a lot of money trying to diversify their economy and repair their image, much of it with limited success.


  • Prices really haven’t come back to normal. Average prices is around 7 dollars a dozen, with lows around 5 dollars a dozen depending on area.

    In 2019 it was between 1.30 and 2 dollars a dozen.

    The H5 bird flu strain hasn’t been contained, and it probably never will be, it’s been rampant for nearly half a decade at this point and they’re still nowhere near containing it. It’s endemic in the migratory bird population. At this point the only flocks that won’t be routinely wiped by it are smaller flocks in better conditions.

    Beyond the reality of higher turn over in flocks due to routine outbreaks, it also gives them an excuse to steadily press up prices to pad margins.