UK: Food inflation rises to 18.2% as it hits highest rate in over 45 years

I cannot believe supermarkets these days, it is insane the increases in prices, I’ve seen £5 for a tube of normal toothpaste and £6 for a tiny Pizza that is sometimes available for £3. How people on modest salaries survive I don’t know.<p>Quite often I’m starting to notice dark patterns in pricing where things you normally didn’t worry about will have randomly increased by £2-3 and you get the checkout and you’ve spent £25-30 on next to nothing.<p>I wonder if inequality increases caused by printing trillions of dollars during COVID are anything to do with this inflation? Could it be that making the rich endless more wealthy and increasing asset prices is bad for society?<p>How do we fix this? Some people think redistribution of the increases the wealthy have had over COVID back to the poor would be a good move, but is this all inequality?

Living in the UK, yes food prices are rising. But I work for an NGO whose main focus is in East Africa and I&#x27;ve been tracking food inflation there and seeing 200-400% jumps over the past three years.<p>Perfect storm of the lack of available fertilizer, wheat shortage and poor growing seasons over the past five years is hitting everyone. I don&#x27;t see it geetting better until the world adjusts; swapping to alternative crops and producing nitrogen fertilizer at country level.

For reference, that&#x27;s a fairly average value for Europe at the moment. Not sure why the UK is being singled out.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;8hbhiqhowjpa1.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.redd.it&#x2F;8hbhiqhowjpa1.png</a>

A good if overly simplistic model of inflation &amp; recession etc... is building a rocket in the game Factorio<p>The rocket isn&#x27;t necessarily intrinsically useful for everyone but is important because it is the thing that pulls forward all the demand for the all the commodities and all the intermediate production.<p>Without the rocket there would be no factories, no jobs, no meaning. The factory MUST run to keep everyone&#x27;s livelihoods going even though the rocket isn&#x27;t relevant day to day. It also incentivizes things like innovation, efficiency, etc...<p>However, building TWO rockets at the same time puts such a resource demand that there start to be shortages and breakdowns. Parts of the factory start shutting down. People are left jobless. One of the most serious is if the factory breakdown cascades to the power system (e.g. money) which causes the entire factory to breakdown.<p>It&#x27;s a tough job to figure out how to restart the factory incrementally. Meanwhile everyone is left jobless while this is being debugged.<p>So there&#x27;s a balance between how many rockets have to be simultaneously built. If there&#x27;s too little demand, the factories are idle. Capital rots and there are less jobs. If there&#x27;s too much demand, then shortages and price spikes will cause an even more serious breakdown.<p>What gold&#x2F;bitcoin&#x2F;austrian philosophers understand is that the price of money HAS to reflect market reality. E.g. in a Factorio game all bottlenecks are important to production but if you mess up the energy bottleneck, then the whole thing breaks down. Having a hack like &quot;manually move a few tons a coal every hour&quot; and forgetting it once is catastrophic. The market conditions have been manipulated with buffer.<p>The Fed &amp; other central banks are usually concerned primarily with the layers of production that affect the most people. E.g. food and gas are critical. However when the &quot;power supply&quot; is threatened they <i>need</i> to start doing things like bailing out banks even if it seems insane to be focusing on this when people can&#x27;t afford food.

Meanwhile in Sweden the CEO of ICA, the largest supermarket chain in the country (53% of the market) said yesterday: &quot;It is actually the consumer who controls what they are prepared to pay for a product. In the end, it is they who decide.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;omni.se&#x2F;icas-vd-det-ar-kunderna-som-avgor-matpriset&#x2F;a&#x2F;3Ex1zd" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;omni.se&#x2F;icas-vd-det-ar-kunderna-som-avgor-matpriset&#x2F;...</a>

The summary is that productivity is down, money supply is way up. The value of money, in particular, the strength of the US Dollar is backed, fundamentally, by the strength of US and US productivity. The problem is that the money printed did not sufficiently go into factors that increased productivity (relative to the money printed) and instead contributed to an asset bubble and consumption (relative to investment in productive capacity).<p>Unfortunately, the Fed has to raise rates to reduce the money supply (increase the cost of borrowing) which puts downward pressure on productivity. This is not a foregone conclusion but is the likely outcome, hence the need to &quot;do more with less&quot; mantra of tech.<p>So while the money supply will decrease, the real question is will the money supply decrease relative to productivity. Otherwise, we are basically in for a stagflationary period unless technologies like LLMs produce a step-function increase in productivity and efficiency.<p>The problem is there is also an inverse relationship between productivity gains due to technology and effort. Meaning technology makes life easier, so people work less, effectively resulting in the same overall output, unless economic conditions dictate otherwise. In which case, inflation may not be a bad thing in the very near short term, provided we can produce our way out of it, which may be possible if LLM technologies result in new industries and job opportunities. (However current thinking indicates the opposite, jobs will likely be eliminated as a result of LLM technologies.

Most food packaging is made with aluminium. Aluminium is down 30% YoY but up 50% in the past 3 years. It&#x27;s been a wild ride for manufacturers and they increased prices to handle this. Same with energy, the average cost is 50% up from ~3 years ago. Not just electricity that powers up the factories, but the oil for everything logistics.<p>If you&#x27;re Unilever&#x2F;P&amp;G&#x2F;Nestlé, what do you do? You start cutting costs (less&#x2F;worse materials - that&#x27;s called skimpflation), total production volumes or less volume per product (shrinkflation). You also are not as inclined as before to give out promotions and benefits. The good old &quot;pay 1 take 2&quot; is now &quot;pay 1 take half&quot;. Retailers get squeezed because they can&#x27;t just pass the whole price raise down to the end customer, so they suck it up a little and get less profits. They also had more operational costs, so they get screwed (mostly the people working there). The smaller ones may shut down or get M&amp;A&#x27;d, the big ones survive.<p>To make matters worse, the world is simply unpredictable right now. Post-covid you would expect some categories would go up (deodorants, for example), but then you have a war in Ukraine and a global rise in interest rates. When managers can&#x27;t predict they go with the worst-case scenarios in their pricing strategies, reinforcing all that&#x27;s bad.<p>Personally, I&#x27;m saving what I can, investing in inflation-indexed bonds and the occasional &quot;buy the dip&quot; for some select stocks, freezing cooked foods with a month in advance, and being very cautious with any job movements. I hope I&#x27;m wrong but I believe that will be the way to go for at least a year, if not more.

There&#x27;s a lot of arguments about the mechanisms of inflation, and its various symptoms, but surely the root cause of inflation is elevated energy prices?<p>I mean energy underpins the price of everything else in an economy, especially production and transportation, which in turn affects the price of groceries. I guess as far as groceries go there&#x27;s also a significant labor component, but still, it must surely be the cost of energy as the principal driver of inflation?<p>Edit: typos

There seems to be a widely accepted and unchallenged consensus that political power is unable to address inflation. Maybe it ain&#x27;t necessarily so? In 1971 Nixon froze prices and wages by executive order. But these days the political world seems oddly submissive to whatever the market wants to do.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nixon_shock" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nixon_shock</a>

I believe that we can make a small dent on this problem if we improve the technology that runs greenhouses. (My bias: I work for a startup that is working on this and I&#x27;m kind of obsessed with the industry.)<p>Here is what current greenhouse tech looks like: a human (called a grower) uses their intuition to adjust hundreds of settings that parameterise what the actuators should do in different circumstances. For example, 20 settings might parameterise a &#x27;ventilation setpoint line&#x27;, which determines what air temperature the vents should start opening at given a measurement of the solar radiation intensity from a weather station. All the different actuators (heating pipes, vents, screens, misting systems, irrigation systems) have their own set of heuristics that need to be adjusted by hand..then beneath that a low-level control layer (e.g., PI control) manipulating individual motors&#x2F;valves.<p>It&#x27;s crazy but the grower has to manually adjust the settings as the weather, energy prices and crop state changes. With better software&#x2F;automation we can improve the control of the environment within the greenhouse and thereby increase yields [kg&#x2F;m^2] and minimise energy costs.<p>If the farmers are producing more tomatoes per m^2 for the same input costs they can afford to sell them to consumers (via supermarkets) at lower prices and still make money. It won&#x27;t solve all the problems but would be a step in the right direction.

I think summer 2023 is likely to have more protests than 2020:<p>- Food prices are highly correlated with societal discontent. Need bread, circuses alone insufficient.<p>- 2024 election cycle is starting to ramp up, society will be thinking more politically.<p>- We&#x27;re having a warm spring - could be a hot year. Tempers flare more easily in higher temperatures.<p>- Looks like we&#x27;re heading into a recession. As the fed fights inflation, peoples investment savings will drop in value, making the middle class feel less secure.

Is this at least partially Brexit related? For comparison, the US has seen food go up by around 10% over the same time period, which is pretty high but also far from 18%.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;news.release&#x2F;cpi.t02.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bls.gov&#x2F;news.release&#x2F;cpi.t02.htm</a>

A lot of the inflation on food is increasingly feeling like businesses cashing in. For instance my old go to brand of breed increased by over 50% months ago.

There was 11+ Trillion injected into the economy, most of that did not got to the poor. Lets pay more attention to this cause

At this point, I feel like people are rising prices because everyone else is rising prices because “inflation.” Literally my wife raised her prices for haircuts simply because everyone else was and she was getting comments that she was too inexpensive.

&gt; This saw select fruit and vegetables rationed in UK supermarkets, due to shortages caused by bad weather conditions in the South of Europe and Northern Africa and many growers having to cut back due to rising costs of heating greenhouses.<p>Besides the obvious degradation of the energy and fertilizer markets from the war in Ukraine, the collapsed Pound is probably the biggest factor here.

The Economist ran a story the other week on the topic of food costs talking about how the tomato can be looked at as a type of energy store &amp; how British supermarkets differ from other European supermarket chains by rationing out veg rather than increasing pricing. [0] This was to say the &quot;shortages&quot; were more of a quirk of the British market rather than purely due to Brexit.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;britain&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;02&#x2F;britains-tomatoes-are-a-victim-of-the-energy-crisis" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;britain&#x2F;2023&#x2F;03&#x2F;02&#x2F;britains-tomato...</a>

the way inflation is measured I think is accurate for a certain type of economic measurements, but it&#x27;s not the intuition that consumers have about inflation. It&#x27;s a moving average to ask &quot;prices this month are what percent over what they were this month a year ago?&quot;<p>because if prices shot up 20% last July, and then stopped going up August and onward, the measure is going to say that inflation this month is still at 20% over last year, but consumers have already got used to the new price level in the shops. At the same time, Joe Average is likely to be ready to grumble about prices all the time, so hearing that inflation is still at 20% will reinforce a sense that isn&#x27;t really accurate.<p>I&#x27;m not saying economists are not measuring the right things, I&#x27;m saying that the way the stories are played in the press requires some digging or interpretation.

I&#x27;m more than a bit irritated that the inflation news push out just the annual number and do not show how the acrual CPI index has developed. As an example, euro area headline inflation has been practically zero since october [1], and yet only thing you see in the news <i>and ECB commentaries</i> is the YoY number scaremongering.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;euro-area&#x2F;consumer-price-index-cpi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tradingeconomics.com&#x2F;euro-area&#x2F;consumer-price-index-...</a>

I hear the inflation numbers and I&#x27;m always like &quot;are they living in the same world as me?&quot;<p>Pre-COVID I used to able to run and get lunch for under $5.<p>Now I&#x27;m lucky to spend less than $15.

This is just further evidence that whatever problems the US has, things consistently keep being worse elsewhere, whether it&#x27;s inflation (like in the UK or Germany, such as food and energy prices), unrest (like the protests in France), natural disasters (Turkey earthquake), etc. As much as both sides lament about the decline of freedoms and overreach of &#x27;the state&#x27;, in EL Salvador tens of thousands of people have been rounded up and arrested--due process be damned.<p>America continues to occupy a privileged position in the world of stability and prosperity despite always feeling on the precipice of civil war, unrest, or crisis--but that never quite gets there. What could have been a major banking crisis 2 weeks ago was averted by more coordination between policy makers, and of course, lot&#x27;s of liquidity.<p>How long will it last? I don&#x27;t know, but I don&#x27;t want to bet against it either.

The interesting thing about food is that most people in the country probably spend 10x on food than what they really need to (including eating&#x2F;drinking out). We pay for convenience and luxury, but if push comes to shove there’s a <i>lot</i> of economising to be had.

Demand for food is inelastic, so it makes sense that companies are raising prices as high as possible since people still have to eat. Generally this leads to price competition from other food brands, but when single companies own dozens&#x2F;hundreds of food brands it’s easy to act like a cartel and keep prices high.

There&#x27;s got to be a couple trillion dollars worth of friction in international shipping. There have to be tech plays here for someone.

As someone who doesn&#x27;t live in the UK, the impression I get from headlines is that the UK is becoming poorer by the day, the NHS has collapsed, crime is exploding, poverty is rising, most people can&#x27;t afford anything anymore, the Royal Mail is hanging by a thread, and the economy is in free fall.<p>What&#x27;s the reality? In London and outside?

Not related but The price of poultry has gone up significantly in the GTA, and a friend who works for the government informed me that there is an outbreak of bird flu in Ontario that&#x27;s affecting poultry farms. Unfortunately, farmers can&#x27;t talk about it due to ag-gag laws.

Glancing at the exchange rates the pound fell year over year 5% from a local max vs Euro so this is on top of the certainly high inflation on Europe. Also it is said that UK supermarkets lock in prices long term with domestic producers. But goods are somewhat mobile so the shelfs in the UK empty. And while it is just an anecdotal bit - our local Aldi here in Germany was selling British scones and shortbread.<p>While the exchange rates over the past decade mostly move sideways and the effect yoy should be one-off the current moves in the financial markets have potential for further disruption and the UK being more isolated will see her Pound fluctuating more with more immediate impact on people and business.

The UK politics seems like a separate level of dysfunction. It seems like all the worst decisions being made together. For some reason people voted for Brexit. The PM who was the chief Brexit Campaigner (Boris Johnson) had to resign because of entirely avoidable mistakes. The next PM had to resign too soon due to trying to bring policies which were not well thought out. The current PM had to be annointed since it didn&#x27;t seem like the Party membership would vote for him.<p>It doesn&#x27;t seem like Labour has a charismatic leader either. I could never even find a concrete stance by Corbyn on what he was running on wrt Brexit.<p>HNers from UK, what does the outlook look like policy wise for the UK.

Yet another sector where investment is low and prices are high.<p>Over winter tomatoes were in short supply, not because we couldn&#x27;t grow them, but because the methods of heating greenhouses were too expensive. CO2 heaters use gas in largely uninsulated greenhouses. A bit of creativity (solar thermal with storage supplying radiators) or just modernity (air source heat pumps) would have solved this problem.<p>Alas, there is little guidance and support. The economic case for fossil fuels continues to weaken and the government does absolutely nothing to support a transition to cleaner sources of fuel which provide shelter from the volatility of energy markets. So we pay instead.<p>What absolute rot.

have consumers increased their exposure to rising costs by consuming fewer raw materials and more finished goods? instead of buying flour, eggs, butter, cocoa powder to make a chocolate cake - they just go buy the cake. and I recognize there&#x27;s an entire spectrum of stages each raw material goes through to get to the final finished product. each of those stages though is an attack vector for cost increases (legit or malicious - doesn&#x27;t matter)<p>having the skills&#x2F;knowledge to consume fewer finished products is insurance. and the only real price for that insurance is time.

Interestingly, it seems like even those products seemingly not affected by price inflation have taken a hit over here in the UK. In addition to that, we&#x27;ve also seen:<p>1. Products offering far smaller portion sizes than before, likely to an even more ridiculous degree than what was happening with things like crisps and chocolate already.<p>2. The taste and quality of a lot of food items getting worse (probably because the original ingredients got more expensive&#x2F;became uneconomical to use).<p>So even products that stayed the same price seem to have suffered recently.

Something interesting is that this article breaks the narrative about it all being about the vegetables and the weather. Veg inflation was 18%, slightly below the average. Several other food categories like grains and fats had higher inflation.<p>This certainly seems to be more of a sign of a weakening pound not buying as much in n imports than something about food alone.

Everything is mass produced. The prices are inflated because lack of competition. In a monopoly the seller sets the prices. That said, food is cheap, and consumers don&#x27;t care what something costs. And if you are poor you usually have to buy from the most expensive shop, people with free time can afford to buy where its cheapest.

Sweden is at 22% rise.<p>Thanks Economists!

I&#x27;m living in the UK (Edinburgh) and I definitely feel like everything has gotten worse. The facts - on waiting times, strike days, inflation, wage stagnation, inequality etc. - speak for themselves. But there is also just a general feeling of malaise and decay.<p>I will say that the large population of increasingly Facebook-addled Boomers really don&#x27;t help. These are people who&#x27;ve paid off their mortgage, can collect rental income, are becoming pensioners, and generally vote against immigration, against public spending, and for lower tax rates. They&#x27;re also massive consumers of NHS resources. We&#x27;re going to be supporting these people with our taxes for decades to come. Meanwhile the Government has consistently failed to support productivity growth or infrastructure investment, and our whole economy is oriented around the service sector in London and a handful of other cities.<p>The only alternative prospectus (Corbyn&#x27;s &quot;Green New Deal&quot;) was trashed by the established media, and his successor is now delivering bromides about national unity and being &quot;tough on crime&quot;. He&#x27;s also put EU integration completely off the menu. Nobody in power seems to grasp the scale of the economic and demographic crisis we&#x27;re facing. It&#x27;s not great.

Fun graphic of inflation broken down to nearly the smallest thing in a typical US household.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usafacts.org&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cpi&#x2F;inflation-parts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;usafacts.org&#x2F;projects&#x2F;cpi&#x2F;inflation-parts</a>

Inflation is super high in California, but I track it mentally on a per product basis for things I buy regularly. Juice is up 33% - lots of things are 18%, 25%, etc.<p>I dont care what they state national inflation is - Its important by food category.

On the topic of whether inflation hits the poor harder than the rich, I have been undecided&#x2F;inconclusive in my mind about this. And would love some perspectives on it, along the lines of:<p>Although day to day items that dominate the spending of a lower income person&#x27;s paycheck are easily seen affected when inflation hits, for a wealthy person, whatever savings and money is accumulated <i>eventually</i> has to be spent on such things also -- whether directly by the owner, or through goods&#x2F;services that have to pay such expenses.<p>So in time, in having to spend their wealth, the rich get affected by shrinking buying power as well. (they just have the luxury to spend on more items that are not daily&#x2F;monthly subsistence expenses)<p>Is that reasonable to think?<p>Why am I getting downvoted for such a legitimate economic question? Is this offensive against lower income people?

I wonder if this will give rise to more gardening, and specifically indoor gardening, or a 4 climate greenhouse?<p>Society has really quickly lost touch with one’s food sources in a few generations.<p>One way to stick it back is to set a slow running cron job.

I sincerely hope to never hear “post scarcity” used in a sentence again.

Does anyone know what is powering worldwide price inflation? And how the US Fed raising interest rates will somehow combat a global phenomenon? Is it due to the Unjust War on the Breadbasket?

This also does not include &#x27;shrinkflation&#x27;, which is rampant. They are slightly reducing the size of items while keeping price the same &#x2F; higher.

Sweden hit 22% recently, it&#x27;s definitely painful for many.

At the same time as we are told any wage increases will drive inflation when all it would do is follow inflation that has already happened.

In the US - once cheaper foods are spiraling out of control - and certain cheap foods are just missing.

It&#x27;s way more than that. I&#x27;m paying double for nearly everything now.

Given that there’s an obesity epidemic in the United States, we would benefit long term from such high food inflation IMO. It will force people to reach for cheaper, healthier options, or simply go without food and use up their fat stores. The poorest are often the most obese here.

Anyone who watched Clarkson&#x27;s Farms would get the impression that overburdensome government regulations on farming have contributed tremendously to increase food costs in the UK. Clarkson himself during the series mentions that Brexit has had an impact too.

Not just price rises but shrinkflation too. That too is out of control

Historically this type of inflation always ends well &#x2F;s

Time to start importing USA chicken and other foods.

I&#x27;m sure a 3% COLA will fix that right up!

Obviously, inflation will destroy the value of wealth, and disincentivise future investment, so in order to reduce inflation, we need to raise interest rates.<p>:extreme sarcasm:

haven&#x27;t food price changes historically been under inflation for a long time?

Only a sneak preview to what the future holds as temperatures rise and rise

Turns out that, in the long run, some of us aren&#x27;t dead.<p>Kenyes is though, so...

Argentinians be like: Oh yes, 18%, that is horrible..&quot;

Brexit has been a massive upward redistribution of wealth.

That&#x27;s not inflation just an increase in cost

Solution: Opt out of centralized monetary policy

It is not inflation. It is price gouging.

As a person living in the UK, I have definitely noticed a considerable rise in unit prices. One of many examples is that a loaf of my favourite bread increased from £3 to £4 recently, which was a shocker. Toilet roll prices, as ever what the news loves to talk about, has exploded, increasing by around 70% since 2020 by my anecdotal observation.<p>A sad thought I have about inflation is the fact that it is, wittingly or not, a weapon wielded by the rich against the middle and lower classes. In an inflationary economy, the winners are rich who have valuable assets whose value skyrocket - think real estate, businesses, etc.<p>The lower classes rely on A) proportionately much more on fiat, i.e. monthly paycheck going into current and savings account, and B) a blue-collar job, the wage of which always lags further behind inflation than white-collar jobs.<p>Those two factors combined means that the lower classes get absolutely battered, while the rich just sit gleefully as their asset values balloon and pass down wholesale price increases, etc.<p>It&#x27;s the dark, sinister side of inflation, and I think we are all beginning to see the societal tensions that it is breeding, e.g. endless blue-collar UK worker union strikes, riots, protests, etc.<p>Not saying that it is only one class that is affected, but let&#x27;s face reality here - the lower class suffers by far the most in this situation.

It is truly strange to see so many comments on Hacker News -- a message board owned by YCombinator, a startup accelerator whose actual mission is to launch wildly profitable companies -- talking conspiratorially about the wealthy being &quot;parasites&quot;, lambasting &quot;capitalism&quot;, pointing to increased profits as evidence of unscrupulous behavior.

You will own nothing and you will be happy.

How long before they start colonizing countries again.

It&#x27;s perplexing how some are quick to place all blame on &quot;greedy price gouging capitalists&quot; while you have a massive elephant in the room.<p>As a society, we pride ourselves on being logical yet we ignore the predictable consequences of injecting <i>trillions</i> into the economy amidst heavily damaged supply chains?<p>I&#x27;m not even referring to the downstream consequences such as the extreme fragility leading to blow ups like SVB. Just consider what might happen when you have <i>trillions</i> in new money competing for <i>fewer</i> goods.

P R I C E C O N T R O L S

Given that most people are fat, reducing food purchasing by 20% is actually pretty realistic if needed.

Who would have thought empire came with a price? Even when you&#x27;re just a junior partner to the madness, albeit much more enthusiastic than the rest of NATO.

The nasty move is when they reduce the weight of the package but keep the price the same. Meanwhile everyone on PPP loan cash out built their own custom made mansion. And we’re more concerned with paying out millions in reparations. The country deserves to fail if this is how we prioritize our concerns

I know this doesn&#x27;t fit the European worldview, but if only they had Costco.<p>They make 0-1% margin [0] on their groceries - which by the way is very high in quality.<p>Essentially all their profit is from their annual membership fee.<p>You have to buy massive quantities of everything though. This works well if you live in a huge North American house and have an SUV to transport your month&#x27;s (year&#x27;s?) groceries.<p>[0] I saw a newsletter from Ryan Reeves and confirmed it by checking their financial statements

This was predicted when Ukraine was invaded. Russia and Ukraine were the world&#x27;s leading producers of the ingredients in fertilizer.<p>They are now no longer exporting, and many countries in the world are getting 50% or more of their calories from import. Things will get better before they get worse.

What about grocery store profit margins?<p>&gt; Bread was up 20.8%, with pasta products and couscous up 25.3%<p>This is unjustified. Under no circumstances could this happen unless a) price gauging, or b) supply chain is drying up.<p>Edit for the ignorant:<p>&gt; The UK is largely self-sufficient in production of grains, producing over 100% of domestic consumption of oats and barley and over 90% of wheat. Average yields over recent decades have been broadly stable but fluctuate from year to year as a result of better or worse weather. Increasingly unpredictable and extreme weather as a result of climate change is likely to exacerbate these fluctuations. Wheat yields in 2020 were the lowest since 1981 due to of unusually bad weather. However, preliminary data indicates they have since increased in 2021.<p>&gt; In meat, milk, and eggs, the UK produces roughly equivalent volume to what it consumes. In 2020 it produced 61kg of meat, 227L of milk and 172 eggs per person per year. By value, the UK is a net importer of dairy and beef. This reflects UK consumer preferences for eating higher value products, while lower value products are exported.<p>&gt; The UK produces a significant proportion of its other crop needs, including around 60% of sugar beet, 70% of potatoes and 80% of oilseeds. Apart from a recent pest-related reduction in oilseeds, these proportions have remained stable over the last ten years. Climate change represents a risk to production both in terms of making conditions unsuitable for some crops and allowing new pests to proliferate but it may also benefit new types of crops.<p>&gt; The UK produces over 50% of vegetables consumed domestically, but only 16% of fruit. 93% of domestic consumption of fresh vegetables was fulfilled by domestic and European production, while fruit supply is more widely spread across the EU, Africa, the Americas, and the UK.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021&#x2F;united-kingdom-food-security-report-2021-theme-2-uk-food-supply-sources" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;statistics&#x2F;united-kingdom-food...</a>

&gt; Food inflation hit its highest rate since 1977 last month, having risen to 18.2% in the year to Februaury [sic] 2023.<p>Doesn&#x27;t anybody read what they write?

Would it not make sense to have a crypto solution to the inflation problem? Can&#x27;t governments initiate a crypto currency which can be only used for a basket of goods and the providers of these goods can then exchange this currency for input goods or fiat money after verifying. This crypto coin can be distributed to everyone every month&#x2F;week and with a expiry date.<p>What I understand is that inflation in high price goods gets passed on to the essential goods as a lifting tide lifts every boat but these can be decoupled.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Edict_on_Maximum_Prices" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Edict_on_Maximum_Prices</a><p>&gt;The Edict on Maximum Prices is still the longest surviving piece of legislation from the period of the Tetrarchy. The Edict was criticized by Lactantius, a rhetorician from Nicomedia, who blamed the emperors for the inflation and told of fighting and bloodshed that erupted from price tampering.<p>&gt;During the Crisis of the Third Century, Roman coinage had been greatly debased by the numerous emperors and usurpers who minted their own coins, using base metals to reduce the underlying metallic value of coins used to pay soldiers and public officials.

This is really a perfect storm of poor planning and adverse events:<p>1. Russia&#x27;s invasion of Ukraine hit energy prices. Europe-wide Ukraine has been a bit of a scapegoat however as Europe is in an energy crisis in large part due to poor planning. That is, complete dependence on Russian natural gas when for almost 10 years the US saw this coming and <i>begged</i> Europe to build LNG ports;<p>2. Ukraine produces a significant amount of wheat. The war has disrupted that supply and had a large effect on wheat prices. These are pretty much back down to pre-invasion levels but this brings us to;<p>3. Corporate profiteering. The solution to this is windfall profits taxation.<p>Remember when people can&#x27;t afford to heat their homes and have enough to eat, that&#x27;s not an inevitability to just throw your hands up at. It&#x27;s a choice. The government could raises money through taxes and subsidize energy costs as a short-to-medium term measure if they wanted to.<p>The worst part of this is how many just throw their hands up and say there&#x27;s nothing we can do other than raise interest rates.