The problem is the way the system is rigged.
Kroger is a publicly traded company, their stock price right now is 46.71 / share.
You can see their most recent earnings report here:
Operating Profit of $912 million; EPS of $0.88
Now then… for NEXT quarter… It doesn’t matter if they are profitable or not. Because they are publicly traded, they are going to be expected to make MORE profit than they did this quarter.
Let’s say next quarter they “only” have $890 million in profit… Most of us would KILL to be that profitable.
The stock market analysts will look at it and go “yeah, but you ‘lost’ $22 million from last quarter…” and they will punish Kroger for failing.
Even worse…
Let’s say Kroger raised their prices and pulls in a profit of $915 million next quarter… they can STILL get punished if the market goes “Yeah, but our analysts expected you to bring in $921 million in profit.”
Failing to meet or beat “expectations” is just as bad as raking in less of a profit than last time.
So prices go up, because they have to make more money than the same time last month, last quarter, last year.
they can STILL get punished if the market goes “Yeah, but our analysts expected you to bring in $921 million in profit.”
This happened to the company I’m in. We had record profits, were positive for the first time in years, and beat our goals by a decent bit. Stock prices tanked anyway because “the best we’ve ever done” wasn’t good enough for the shareholders.
And disregarding those expectations can carry personal liability for anyone in a position to do it, because the executive leadership of the company has a legal responsibility to act in the interest of the shareholders above all else.
So like, I’m no stock broker, but if I understand right, a company doesn’t directly benefit in any way from a higher stock price, right? They could split it, but for the most part, once their shares are bought up, the only people benefiting from the stock are rando shareholders and the handful of employees with stock options.
The stock price determines the overall value of the company and has all kinds of ramifications, purchase ability, loan agreements, etc. etc.
Ah, I see. Interesting.
Adding to this:
Executives are often paid in stock so they’re invested in seeing the price go up.
A corporation’s board of directors (who lead the company and can fire/hire executives) are also paid in stock or have very large stock holdings already.
All the people at the top benefit from seeing that stock price go higher. They care more about stock price than whether or not customers are happy, or if they’re doing right by their employees.
Visited a friend in VA, she went to Kroger’s to pick up medicine and I decided to grab snacks.
A case of soda and 3 bags of chips was like $40,
When I got home, I went grocery shopping at Martin’s.
A gallon of nature’s promise milk, 3 pounds of fresh mozzarella, 2 loafs of bread, a pint of ice cream and another case of soda came out to be about the same price.
This may also be a message about how weirdly expensive junk food has gotten, but dairy is usually the most expensive items on my list
I always imagine the stockholder that trades off quarterly expectations to be someone sitting in an overly large home getting all bent out of shape because someone else’s labor didn’t make them enough money RIGHT NOW!
It isn’t one guy adjusting one portfolio relative to a single quarterly change in profits. You have to look at this as thousands of hedge funds with tens of billions of dollars in investor cash comparing Kroger to Safeway and Walmart and saying “I want 8% exposure to the cyclical consumer retail sector and I have $X-Billion to invest, how much of that do I want to distribute across these three companies?” And then if Kroger underperforms Safeway and Walmart, my algorithm tells me to sell Kroger stock and use the proceeds to buy up Safeway/Walmart.
This gives Safeway/Walmart a lower rate of effective borrowing, which means they can build new stores in territory adjacent to Kroger locations or expand into territory none of them dominate. It sets off a cascading effect in which Safeway gets to grow while Krogers treads water. Eventually, Safeway can start installing stores directly adjacent to Kroger and selling everything in this one storefront at 10% under cost-of-purchase until Krogers goes out of business from cut-rate competition. Then Safeway jacks up their prices at this one store and returns to rising profitability.
That’s the market mechanism in effect. Low lending rates mean you can drive your competitors out of business. So everyone needs to run a competitive profit margin in order to avoid getting swallowed up by their neighbors. And the folks who decide if you’re “competitive” are a handful of mega-investment banks that decide how much of your stock they’re going to buy.
It’s all so dumb. I’m sorry for the language, but it’s just really, really dang dumb. There, I said it.
abolish the stock market. put these hogs on a fucking island with no natural resources but sand and salt water. set up a camera and let us watch.
The problem is that a bunch of the hogs are our retirement funds.
We need to remove the middle-men from the equation and institute guaranteed basic income before we can change it.
It’s interesting how recent the stock market really is:
https://www.sofi.com/learn/content/history-of-the-stock-market/
"The first modern stock trading market was created in Amsterdam when the Dutch East India Company was the first publicly traded company. To raise capital, the company decided to sell stock and pay dividends of the shares to investors. Then in 1611, the Amsterdam stock exchange was created. For many years, the only trading activity on the exchange was trading shares of the Dutch East India Company.
At this point, other countries began creating similar companies, and buying shares of stock was popular for investors. The excitement blinded most investors and they bought into any company that began available without investigating the organization. This resulted in financial instability, and eventually in 1720, investors became fearful and tried to sell all their shares in a hurry. No one was buying however, so the market crashed.
. . .
Although the first stock market began in Amsterdam in 1611, the U.S. didn’t get into the stock market game until the late 1700s. It was then that a small group of merchants made the Buttonwood Tree Agreement. This group of men met daily to buy and sell stocks and bonds, which became the origin of what we know today as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
Although the Buttonwood traders are considered the inventors of the largest stock exchange in America, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange was America’s first stock exchange. Founded in 1790, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange had a profound impact on the city’s place in the global economy, including helping spur the development of the U.S.’s financial sectors and its expansion west."
That’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that the Dutch East India Company was under a legal charter where they could make war with and enslave whoever they wanted to as a quasi-independent entity.
That’s what the stock market concept is based upon. Slavery and murder.
I mean, that’s a bit unfair. The stock market is a concept that’s based on expected annual growth paid out in a steady return on investment. Slavery and murder just happen to be incredibly lucrative industries, such that you could confidently invest in firms like Dutch East India and expect more than you put in.
Pick up a copy of Picketty’s “Capitalism In the 21st Century” and you can see how this played out over the long term. Prior to Capitalist market mechanics, you’d have these feudal estates that would levy rents with a steady-state expectation of returns. You had 10,000 acres being worked by 100 farmers and they tithed you their surplus in food. You warehoused that food and traded it back to them for their labor, with which you built churches and castles and recruited soldiers for your next war. But the real economy was stagnant, outside fluctuations in population from plague or invasion or natural disaster.
Then you get this idea of cumulative return on investment, and there’s this sudden rapid expansion of commerce and capital that simply had no historical parallel. This didn’t need to be predicated on bloodshed or occupation. The textile industry boom in the UK, for instance, was this more-or-less bloodless conflagration of productive forces. Huge industrial looms turned a desperately scare resource into a cheap consumer commodity within a span of a few decades. And a big part of that was the feedback loop of investment -> capital production -> lucrative returns -> re-investment.
Similarly, the boom in agricultural productivity thanks to the advent of modern fertilizers has functionally ended natural famines. This was, incidentally, a knock on effect of the Loom Boom, as the first industrial fertilizers were derived from pesticides which were derived from clothing dyes.
The pain and suffering that followed the Dutch East India Company was not a consequence of the market mechanic nearly so much as it was the consequence of an aristocracy with no countervailing force among the proles. It was consistent with the behavior of lords and kings going back thousands of years, just industrialized.
Old man wags finger
Did he say anything about the Albertsons+Kroger merger that’s in the works? ‘Cause that’s not going to make things better and they are acting like it’s a done deal.
Through the magic of capitalism, removing competition will drive prices down! No further questions
Corner the market then lower your prices. It’s basic economics!
Microeconomics: “Hey so we should like have a functioning econ-”
Macroecnomics: “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahaha no”
Government grocery stores would solve this and food deserts…
What are you, some kind of Communist? You can’t have government run retail outlets. It would be inefficient! It would prevent innovation! It would desaturate the market! It would cause millions of farmers to go bankrupt overnight! The employees would all be rapists and arsonists and unionists, while the managers would be bloated government bureaucrats who only care about their cushy government jobs!
You would cause famine and poverty across the entire nation. It would be the worst thing to happen to the country since the Postal Service!!!
I feel like I’ve heard a lot of bias placed against the idea of government in the US as something that’s the source of problems in the country, where private organizations are usually seen as being the solution and not at all related somehow. It doesn’t always strike the mark when criticizing private organizations… people will even jump to the defense of billionaires. Agree that mentioning government grocery stores would result in something like “what you want the government to run groceries? they can’t do anything right, why would you want them to do that?”
I mean when you have one of two major political parties who are dedicated to making the government suck, it’s not surprising that the government sometimes sucks. And when you have a lot of low information (or bad information) people, it’s not surprising that they don’t connect those dots.
Republicans are an existential problem for the United States.
But then the government would have to remedy the surplus of food by implementing food banks. Then markets would crash because everyone would go to food banks instead of grocery stores. Then money would be worthless and the government would have to step in and offer some type of work for rations program. And if that’s successful, it would spread to other industries for furniture and other goods. Is Biden going full Kropotkin?
Based and Breadpilled.
In Canada, people think this is an exclusively Canadian issue happening specifically only at Loblaws and their affiliates.
ITS AN INDUSTRY WIDE SCAM.
accusing the stores of reaping excess profits and ripping off shoppers.
Thanks now can you do this with all the other companies? All.
Also maybe do something with some teeth, not just empty words. Other consumer products are also outrageous but you literally die without food so this is something nobody can just do without.
The problem is he is in the wrong branch to fix it. This is a legislative issue as always. We need the legislative branch to write laws to punish companies for such things. The average person seems to blame the president for not doing the jobs of the Congresss and senators.
Eggs are again steadily rising in price. Wal-Mart “great value” prices isn’t all that ‘great’ to begin with, with most of it’s products.
But can we stop calling things inflation? Call it for what it really has been - G-R-E-E-D
Eggs are again steadily rising in price.
This one can still be pinned on poultry farming greed, but it’s not a pure price gouge.
Avian flu devastates California’s poultry farms as new wave of outbreaks roils industry
I hate to be that guy, but actually it’s not just “greed” this time. There was millions of chickens that had to be culled due to a viral outbreak of Avian flu last season and we are just now seeing the effects of that. Don’t get me wrong greed does play a part, but the major contributing factor this time around for eggs is not greed, but the system rebounding from the outbreak. I know it’s trendy to say greed ruins everything (it can and does), but in this case it helps to have actual context to know what’s going on with the overall picture of things. The more you know, ya know.
https://www.gro-intelligence.com/insights/us-egg-prices-jump-amid-deadly-surge-in-avian-flu
I love to be this guy, but egg production barely dipped in comparison to the MASSIVE jumps in price. They pulled the exact same excuse a couple years back when prices jumped 6x or so. Tell me where on this chart was that price jump ever justified by anything other than greed: https://www.statista.com/statistics/196094/us-total-egg-production-since-2001/
Let me preach about the holy sites known as Costco stores.
Also look for locally sourced eggs and meat, dairy, etc. You can probably find some small farms that sell direct to consumer.
After hearing so many people singing their praises, I finally got a membership.
I used it precisely once. Their prices really were not very good on 90% of what I looked at. Plus they really encourage overconsumption.
Aldi ends up being more convenient and generally cheaper for groceries for me.
I’m not trying to yuck your yum, I just wanted to express an unimpressed opinion for other fencesitters.
If you’re not buying in bulk a lot, it’s not worth it. I’ve been tailgating on my mom’s membership for years and I don’t think I’d have one if it weren’t for that.
I just want to throw out there that Costco also has some weirder, niche services that may be more worth it to individuals, based on their individual lifestyle, such as travel booking, where the packages tend to be really cheap. They also used to have a freaking MORTGAGE SERVICE until 2022, presumably shut down because of the rate increases (I really, really hope they open back up when rates go down again…)
The optical department is worth the price of admission alone. I recently bought 2 sets of glasses, 1 regular with transition and 1 sunglasses with the bells and the whistles. Costco doesn’t charge extra or up sell for most of the add-ons, they are just part of the package. I paid $287 for those 2 pairs before my insurance reimbursed me. Not even accounting for the higher end frames, I would have probably paid $500+ for those 2 with all of the extras.
The pharmacy is worth it as well if you have meds that can be expensive. They can’t get everything cheaper but the ones they do are way less expensive than most other places.
Also for those who happen to live in states where ABC doesn’t control everything, Costco has Kirkland brand vodka and other alcohol that I’ve heard great things about (my state is an ABC state). For the alcohol and maybe the pharmacy you don’t have to have a membership, they escort you to the alcohol and then through checkout.
If you are willing and able to put out the extra cash to front load your food needs for awhile and are capable and willing to do the work to repack and freeze the large amount of food you get, you can find yourself with a lot of extra cash on hand with fewer visits to the store. These days Aldi, Lidl, Teeter, etc are mainly about little things we need day to day and Costco is our big shopping trip once every couple of weeks.
Costco is great… But not everything works best when bought in bulk, and not everything freezes well. Eggs for instance, most people probably aren’t going to go through 72 eggs in a reasonable timeframe. But it’s great for shelf stable items and things you use a lot of.
Yes it is cheaper per unit because you’re buying a larger quantity, but nearly every item is going to be $20+. This also assumes that you can afford the membership cost and the up front budget to be able to start to build that bulk stock, and that you have room for holding that bulk stock at home,
These are things that many people take for granted with so many more people living paycheck to paycheck now with increases in so many other costs now as well.
I bought a giant can of powdered eggs, i love it; you just have to add water, no dealing with shells or fluctuating prices
Stop taking aim and fire
Publix absolutely has fleeced it’s customers since the pandemic.
We dropped Publix and went to Kroger. Saved sooo much $$ for delivery right to our door. We just use Publix to buy fresh meat.
I loved doing grocery delivery but its always always worth to get produce and meat yourself.
Name one company that didn’t fleece it’s customers.
Aldi is a pretty good company, but it had a hard time keeping things in stock
More in the news: government official complains about matters within their jurisdiction.
You have to be some kind of moron to think it would be a good idea for the president to start dictating prices to grocery chains. Unfortunately Lemmy is largely populated by idiots and delusional fools, so I expect this observation to be unpopular.
Read a history book sometime. It’s been done in the past.
I’m not sure why you’d advocate for it if you’ve actually read the history, it’s a terrible idea that has failed spectacularly in the past
mate half the food you eat is subsidized.
Talking about price controls which are not the same thing at all. Read about the Nixon shock, for example.
Just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.
You have to be some kind of moron
idiots and delusional fools
Do not respond to my comments again with personal attacks. If you do this again, or respond before fixing this comment, I will unfortunately have to report you to the community moderators.
Until you fix it, your comment is not worth addressing.
Ad hominem aside, TheSanSabaSongbird’s basic point, that price controls are an economically illiterate idea, is right. Prices are an economy’s way of signalling scarcity, so messing with that signal prevents the underlying problem from being solved. Inflation has to be tackled through monetary and fiscal policy; the alternative approach, micromanaging prices, is how you get to the economy of Argentina.
Prices in capitalism are decoupled from scarcity through corporate profit seeking. In a perfect market falling supply costs would be passed on to the consumer. In our current economy they company eats the price difference and raises the price anyways
No, you don’t understand. The invisible hand is attached to the wrist of God. Prices are never manipulated and gouging is a good thing.
Must be an election year
Yeah didn’t you hear? We’re supposed to magically get a national high speed rail network.
Kinda like that one Obama said he was gonna do a decade ago.
Man I wonder what happened to that.
republicans
Why does Biden go after anything but minimum wage? Just because min wage isn’t a winning issue doesn’t make the problem go away.
Because only Congress can change the minimum wage. You know, the one half controlled by Republicans.
Sure, that is why. Poor Biden, he would help the working class, only if he could. Give president absolute power to use it when they need to help the rich, but when it helps the working class, all of a sudden they are powerless.
You remember the whole student loan forgiveness situation? The executive can only do things that the legislature has granted it power to do. And even then, the supreme court can show up and stop it for whatever reason they pull out of their ass.
Despite what Trump says, the President is not a king. The legislature is by the far the most powerful branch and is most to blame for the current situation. Blame them and especially the filibuster in the Senate.
Didn’t democrats vote in executive power for president during Obama administration so the president can act on their own? Kinda funny how democrats complain republicans are authoritarian, when they give presidents power of kings.
All presidents used executive power for lesser reasons. These are just PR games for naive voters.
Biden takes aim at Palestinian children over objections of humanity.
