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Big Media Finally On The Case Of The Amazing "Value Deflation" Inflation
Two months ago Zero Hedge first touched upon the topic of relative "value deflation" whereby prices for products are kept constant, even as the actual product provided is far less. Back then we recalled the experience of one Walmart shopper who shared the following story: "I noted with interest that the Wal-Mart I shop at had cleared the shelves of "Great Value" brand coffee in 39 oz cans for about 2 weeks. Today the new can appeared, with the following differences: 1.) Can is now 33.9 oz, down from 39 oz. Also conspicuously missing is the conversion of 2lb, 7oz therefore no comparison in pounds is easily made. 2.) Price for this smaller can is up from $9.88 to $10.48, by my rustic math an approximate 20% increase! 3.) Contents of can are no longer 'Premium Columbian' Decaffeinated. Now labeled '100% Classic Decaf'." Indeed, for people attuned to change in prices much more than to changes in amounts, this is the best, if most despicable, way to mask what is rapidly becoming an accelerating inflation problem (and with food prices now officially at their highest levels ever merely compounding the problem). Today, with the traditional two month delay, the mainstream media finally draws attention to this increasingly more troubling development.
While at just two minutes, the following ABC segment is better than nothing, and should provide a sufficient alert to the peasantry just how much less their raped and ravaged dollar goes these days, even if on a relative basis it is actually outperforming the European continent's own one-ply infinitely dilutable piece of toilet paper in the past month or so.
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One person working used to be able to support that family. Now it takes two and if they are both minumum wage earners...good luck.
In 1971 my parents bought our first real home for $17,000 in the subarbs. Then they pulled the womens equal rights scam to get women in the workplace. With 2 parents working in the family, the price of housing skyrocketed. I like to count total household hours worked to pay for the same thing my family of 6 had in 1971 on a 40 hour work week. Now it takes about 100 combined family hours of work/week to pay for what we had back then.
yup, it's all the fault of those uppity wimmenz.
no wai iz they equal humanz!!
It's not that it was the fault of women that this happened. The enterance of women into the workforce should have increased the standard of living of everyone, but instead provided cover for more government spending and more inflation.
The Fed is at fault, not women. No-one is blaming women.
I'll disagree with your "no one" statement, as this is a tired meme endlessly repeated by right-wing talk show hosts, and often gets aired here as women have "feminised america" - as if women have complete control of things (which is hilarious, because this country is top-heavy with wealthy white men last time I checked).
What is rarely mentioned is that working class women have always worked, and the call was for equal pay for equal work. . . as a child I remember my mother coming home from one of her two jobs to collapse on the kitchen floor in tears of exhaustion- she worked in the printing trades, and had been training a man for a few weeks, whereupon the owners gave him a "management" job over her, despite her years of experience - when she called them out on it, she was told "men have to be paid more because they support families" - THIS is the nonsense that needed to be pointed out and dealt with.
Of course, corporate america immediately saw the benefits of hiring women in at lower wages to do the jobs white collar men had a corner on, all the while shipping the blue collar jobs overseas - it's CORPORATE culture one needs to place the blame on, not women in the workforce.
Pray tell, how were women supposed to exist without working? Particularly when they were often left with the children to support. . .
Women have always been equal, they just didn't know it at the time. I've never seen anything drive up the price of housing like the equal rights movement did, except for the previous housing bubble. Housing prices are still too high.
right, women need to be told they're human, because they wouldn't know it otherwise?
tell it to the suffrage movement - women were the LAST to even be "allowed" to vote, decades after black men, and amrka has yet to pass the ERA, equal rights amendment:
if you genuinely believe women in the workplace caused the housing boom(s), I'm gonna back away from this commentary, in amazement. . .
Doubling the # of wage earners/family did it, gender was not the issue. It was just made the issue to drive a wedge between people making them fight with each other. I would gladly stay at home and be a househusband. I like being at home most of the time as I do now, living alone in my paid for 1900sf house in SW FL. I do credit the housing bust as being my only chance to be able to buy a home as an unemployed single person. By the way, did you know there are now more women in the workforce than men?
Michael - Good point. Very good point. I had never viewed it that way, but it's true. As women in the work force increased household income, price inflation on houses had to occur. Nice.
+1.9...you actually get it...
And that's just the shipping. How much does the baby itself cost nowadays?
You can no longer buy a Half Gallon of ice cream.
Coming soon to a store near you:
A "gallon" of milk containing 3.75 quarts and a "grocer's dozen" of eggs that has ten in the package.
Riccota chesse, 1 lb container is now 15 oz.
My father said that we were in a new bull market because the Dow goes up and it is "the" sign of the economy. He said Gold and commodities just popped and will go down and the reason other commodities are going up is because we are in a "recovery". Dude, I don't know what to believe anymore. sigh...
And Benny Bernanke thinks he's 100% sure that he has the tools to contain inflation. Ha! Raising rates in this environment won't stop this value deflation at all. In fact, it will encourage more of it!
So this is Obama's view where "prices necessarily skyrocket" to meet his socialist agenda. I guess it doesn't much matter to the poor or middle class in his mind with the "security net" thrown wider and wider.
100M people on Food Stamps paying more to get less everyday.
This will not end well.
"100M people on Food Stamps paying more to get less everyday."
Do you see the correlation in your own sentence?
If a picture is worth a thousand words, just take a look at all of the soft commodities ranging from soybeans, corn, wheat to lumber.. Even with Monday and Tuesdays mild sell off...most of them are now trading just below all time highs...
http://chart.ly/55eyuyy
is this a sign of a good or bad economy?
How does your pocketbook feel? Mine, ain't to happy. Solve a few "food" problems with a garden this year. What good is grass anyway?
Marginalize loses from 6.2% to 4.2%. Recoup gains on Federal withholdings. Weeeeeeeeeee.
We have another Obama success story for recovery in the Progressive MSM workings. LOL
http://www.irs.gov/pub/newsroom/notice_1036.pdf
Toilet paper is what I first noticed; smaller roll, higher price.
http://consumerist.com/2009/10/northern-hopes-you-dont-notice-your-shrinking-toilet-paper.html
And then, the shrink-rayed products started showing up in just about everything. Ice cream, croutons, candy bars, coffee, tuna fish (just about half water now), you name it.
I'm also a label reader; food that used to contain real things such as sugar are now filled with HFCS and sundry unrecognizable chemical compounds.
Even noticed that deodorant scents are much more faint these days.
The "upside" to this price inflation for me is that it has finally, finally gotten my kids interested in monetary policy and how it does affect all of us directly. They look for and point out examples of this and I've overheard them do a fairly good job explaining it to their friends.
This tactic is nothing new, businesses have used it for decades to fatten profit margins. I don't think this tactic is nearly as despicable, as our governments fraudulent CPI numbers. Businesses are supposed to squeeze as much money as they can, the government however is supposed to be representing the people (laugh).
why didn't they do this before the recession then?
Goldman Sachs "got you in a stranglehold baby" ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mNirQe9EyM&feature=sub
Better "stone them to death", says Ted.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHDA5nHlDrQ
I would, but they reduced the average weight per stone below the "kill" threshold in the bags of stones I buy.
China is the only country who knows how to tackle economy of 1.35 Billion people. Rest of the world is totally useless
Not from what I see.
The ghost towns of China: Amazing satellite images show cities meant to be home to millions lying deserted
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339536/Ghost-towns-China-Satellite-images-cities-lying-completely-deserted.html#ixzz1AEFPnqRq
Timmah sat cross legged two feet away from the screen. Timmah was playing his 8 bit Nintendo PPT video game and munching popcorn fresh out of the nuker. Bernanke walked in hot and bothered and threw his coat across Bawknee Fwank who was sitting on the love couch.
"Get Blythe on the phone Bawknee." He went into is room and turned on his monie printer. Bahknee followed him with a telephone on a silver plater. He didn't say a word.
"Blythe this is Bennie." "Give it to me babe." Said Blythe in a voice better suited for gurgling glass shards. She exhaled her cigerette. "You gonna give it to me?" Bing went the printer. Ben jumped on his computer and loosened his tie.
"You want it you got it. I just leased so much gold your pussy is going to cry." Blythe checked her fund. It was flush with cash and she pointed it towards the falling gold price. She sold, and the price went down. "Oh yeah!" She screamed into the phone. "You like that! Have some more! I will lease another tonne!" Oh yeah, big boy, sell it all." She sold more and the price fell further.
From the other room Timmah had his hand on his other controller. "Need any hewp wid dawd?" Bawknee raised his shoulders as he said it.
Q: Who is bigger -- Mr. Bigger, or Mr. Bigger's baby?
A: Mr. Bigger's baby, because he's a little bigger.
to those who are all up in arms about incremental decreases in q/p, stop looking at the labels. be the frog.
problem solved.
ignorance, bitchez
I'm just waiting till I'm recycled into the food supply as Soylent Green. Just hope I give a congressman diarrhea
Butcher's thumb is here to stay, be vewy, vewy careful...
two out of six items I purchased in my local grocery store rang up over 30 percent higher than listed in the produce dept. today. Also the larger the bag of sugar the higher the price. Lowest price 4lb bag of sugar has more than doubled in the last year.
all your comments are belong to us:http://zhcomments.wordpress.com/
but wait bernenke and krugman saw there is no inflation
and surely they are honorable men...
Go to a pet shop. Buy pvc piping for a fish tank with a shut off valve. Run it from your toilet water tank to just under the seat. presto bidet.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE7040LX20110105
If I say it to myself enough times it will become a reality.
There is not inflation. There is no inflation. There is not inflation. There is no inflation. There is not inflation. There is no inflation. There is not inflation. There is no inflation. There is not inflation. There is no inflation. There is not inflation. There is no inflation...
The only thing driving up commodity prices are speculators armed with cheap money and super fast computers. This is causing a havoc in the lives of rest of the population and pushing them towards poverty as they can no longer afford the basic necessities of life.
Regulators are too slow to react and take ages to identify and take measures to solve the problems.
Total ban on speculation is strictly required all over the world to bring relief to the common man.
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article24581.html
http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article24581.html
go with the flow. buy packaging companies. smaller packages => more packages needed, both in number and in volume of packaging required.