The war prevented critical fertilizer from being delivered. The crop yield will be lacking and food costs will increase, not decrease. Trump is very good at destroying.
Oh and don’t forget that sweet sweet Canadian potash the american people will now be missing.
UK supermarkets have started to compete on selling veg for almost nothing just before Christmas.
And I really mean almost nothing. Went into Aldi and got over 10kg of various vegetables for like £0.20
Probably a loss leader but I bought that and nothing else like 5 times. Still got a couple jars left that I pickled.
Jealous! I’d do so much canning and preserving!
Maybe it was a loss leader to get me buying loads of vinegar. Not that vinegar is overly expensive though.
I also did a little bit of lactofermenting which is cheaper. One of the jars leaked and the brine bubbled over the metal clips causing it to corrode and snap which is a shame. And to buy just that part costs almost as much as an entire jar when I last looked. Did leave some head space but I guess not enough. Or there was brine around the rim already and the bubbling pushed some out.
Maybe worth checking if I can get a bunch of clips for a more reasonable price
Issue is that entertainment and electronics are getting easier to produce. Food does not. And the free market is coming for you.
A lot of it is actually data collection (mass spying and surveillance) being used to harvest and sell vast quantities of data… and that subsidizes the price of the device.
https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/research/smart-tv-data-privacy
Basically, if we make the devices cheaper and spy on every customer, it becomes more profitable to sell at a loss to get more customers to spy on. If they could spy on your eating habbits with food, food prices would also come down.
Also, black Friday is bullshit. The prices usually get artificially inflated ahead of time and the good deals usually have very little units in stock. Door busters for the first five customers or some bullshit.
More importantly though, if it stops being so profitable to harvest data, prices will go up quite a bit on anything used to collect it.
If they could spy on your eating habbits with food
They kind of do this with your “rewards card” or “club card” though.
That’s your buying habbit. They’ve had that for a while now.
For TVs a single sale gets you a microphones for “voice features”, maybe a camera for web video chatting, and can take snapshots of your screen every X seconds to ID what content you are watching, and so much more.
Also with everything that used to be a proof of purchase that now requires a scan of your receipt, box tops for education for instance.
Maybe. But the tech is getting cheaper to produce. Monitors are very cheap, and they aren’t part of this business model.
While I technically agree, they are trying…
https://cybersecuritynews.com/lg-monitor-app-installs-adware/
That’s not really the only thing going on in tech. Sure TVs are a very competitive market where that is being done in part. But a vast majority of the price cut must be attributed to technological advancement.
I don’t disagree that manufacturing costs have gone down, but I question whether that or ads, data collection, and other new smart “features” have most contributed to the lowering price of TVs and other electronics. Note, the reporting referenced are over 5 years old… before AI really took off and the demand for every scrap of data became so profitable.
https://www.howtogeek.com/767919/tv-manufacturers-make-more-from-ads-than-selling-tvs/
That’s bookkeeping magic. They are not talking about the cost of tvs and to consumers but their profit.
Their lower cost divisions such as ads and sponsorship can only operate for they sell tvs. I.e. their cost isnt reflected accurately.
They even talk about how the hardware section’s revenue is much, much greater. But when you got those bonus earnings you can undercut your competition ever so slightly or even sell at a minor loss in the manufacturing while still making a profit. But this barely matters to the price the consumer actually pays.
So you are saying that they are talking about profit and not revenue. Profit - the actual net gain the company gets and the sole reason businesses exist in a capitalist economy, and arguably the more important responsibility of a corporation to its shareholders…
Gross profit:
Source 2021 2020 Device 25.6 58.2 Platform+ 57.3 30.6 To me, it looks like they are making more profit from the platform than from the TV sales themselves. To the point where they could, as you say, literally sell TVs at a loss, and still profit…but that barely matters when it comes to the price of the TV?
When the TV is on the modest end, I think that matters a whole lot. Bigger TVs don’t generate more platform+ revenue than small ones do.
They won’t be giving away 75" TVs or anything, but I think “platform” revenue has sizeable impact on why you can get absurdly cheap 27" flat panel TVs from Vizio and the like.
The issue with this calculus is that they would not turn a profit from the services if they stopped making tvs. This means dividing out these into separate accounts with separate costs is idiotic.
Profit numbers aren’t real. At least not when doing this.
So in order for it to be real, everything must be merged together into a single source of revenue/profit?
I am in no way confused as to whether or not they could make a profit without selling TVs - it says to me that the more TVs they sell, the more the platform can make. The platform becomes the profit generator and the cost and sale price of the TV hardware then becomes a line item in the platform profit calculation.
I’m not a business major but I don’t understand how separating the services and hardware that delivers the services into two measures invalidates my assertion that the services are the profit driving force and the hardware is secondary to that. With the hardware being secondary, keeping its price low or at a loss makes economic sense if the platform generates that much more profit.
I’m arguing such logic has driven down the prices. What are you actually asserting that is relevant to my point?
Production difficulties are less impactful on the price than post-purchase monetization. Which is a fancy way of saying “they collect watching behavior and other metadata that the device can detect (WiFi/bluetooth devices in your house, for instance), send it back to their servers, and sell it”.
Production difficulties are extremely important to the price. 10 years ago displays were much small not for lack of ads, but because semiconductor manufacturing changed. You used to be unable to produce them in that size and error rate.
My point is that a 75” 4K OLED display would be $3-4k without post-purchase monetization, and that you can find them for $1-1.5k as a very direct result of post-purchase monetization. They sell them at a loss these days. And honestly, I don’t think they care much about the enthusiast fringe that goes out of their way to firewall and sandbox those devices so PPM doesn’t work, because the vast, vast majority of consumers don’t know, don’t care, or both.
Considering the entire production chain, from mining and extractivism, to engineering, design, manufacturing, logistics, etc, I strongly believe that it’s only possible through a strong exploitation and asymmetrical relationships between countries in many ways. Also, electronics are only cheaper than groceries in very few countries
My local Sprouts occasionally puts old or discontinued products for 99 cents and I end up feeling like it’s a fucking holiday. Like, fuck yeah I’ll take these discontinued lemon and poppy seed cookies no one wanted.
I think they have an anti waste policy, cause those sales get real heavy sometimes.
A small recompense for the huge prices they charge the rest of the time!
Seriously… It’s so randomly priced, lol. $13 soup? 25 cent bell pepper? $40 herbal supplement?
But I will defend their $4.50 milk, everyone caught up on prices anyway but I swear it tastes better. Same with the $4 eggs that… At one point during the eggdemic, was the cheapest eggs on market. They didn’t even raise their price, they just have different suppliers than Target next door selling shit eggs for $8 a dozen. Lol
I bet those ‘sale’ prices are what the actual sale price should be before the corruption and collusion taxes are applied
I mean, yes and no, there are transport costs and stuff, plus you have operational costs. But they definitely mark up prices by a lot, especially things made in house like their cookies and muffins. Muffins start at $6, they get a mark down to $4 after a day, and probably more but they usually sell at $4. If you consider labor prices, energy cost, and ingredients, that day-old price is still pretty profitable.
You want corruption though, I’m glad Albertsons didn’t get the merger with Kroger/Ralph’s. They already do piss poor quality at high prices for no reason, but I’m also certain they’ve tried to bribe their way into that merger.
They’re hoping that if you watch the circus hard enough through the big electric circus window in your home, you’ll forget that you don’t have any bread.
“Your biggest fan, this is Stan.”
In Canada I saw Black Friday in July ads. Which is really weird considering we don’t celebrate Black Friday. We have Boxing Day instead.
Black Friday has been a thing in Canada for well over a decade at this point. It’s never been as crazy as in the States, but it’s been around for sure.
Some American companies announce it and put things 10% off. It’s still not a thing.
Celebrate is an odd word choice but it’s definitely a thing here.
The day after thanksgiving is not the best time for grocery sales as people haven’t even finished their leftovers yet.
But Black Friday’s in November.
Black Friday is a scam anyways. Just use money on food. Problem solved
Food shortages are expected starting in winter or spring and persisting likely for a few years minimum. Maybe just buy shelf stable food.
How much of it though, and what is likely with shortages?
Not like we can store a year of food.
Just every time you shop buy a few shelf stable things extra until you’re out of space or have a few months reserve minimum
A few months of food is a huge amount to store. Looking at around 30kg of rice per month for 2 of us and that is already a bit low on kcal and would be pretty nutritionally deficient.
Had been hoping to grow some of my own veg but for the same reason as farmers, that hasn’t really worked out very well this year. So little water, many plants are struggling.
It’s not if you are just trying to survive on calories and not actually trying to store a well rounded series of necessary food groups. Rice and beans will go a long long way. You may end up deficient from some vitamins if shit goes south nationally or globally, but it will keep you alive long enough to start figuring out how to get yourself the nutrients you lack.
A pile of just rice is survival food and you need a massive volume of it if you want it to last months.
Normally the advice given to people is to have a few days worth stocked up, maybe a week. We easily can cover that. Multiple months is a massive increase.
25 pounds or rice per person will cover 3-4 months, you don’t even need that much. 15 pounds per person will easily cover a major emergency that lasts the winter. You have that room, everyone does.
