Food prices skyrocketing again!

Thry say that's because of the Nat Ins increases.🤷‍♀️

If you don’t want supermarkets to make profits, go shop at the Co-op, which is member owned. They aren’t any cheaper.

The point about profits and margins has been made several times on this thread.

Pizza for 65p tho, that's practically free

Who do you think makes the rules? You seem to follow them without questioning where they come from. The sky high pay came from philosophy not demand.

Are they 1400% better?

They are. With very rare exception, they are better at doing the job they are doing. They are not better human beings, but they are able to hold positions which 99.999% population couldn't hold. If you ever worked with C-level, you'd see this. And having spend approx 30 years in large corporates I can say almost instantly which grad / junior will make it the top and which won't (assuming no major life accidents of course).

I find these discussions a bit bizarre - in a globally mobile world there are rules of the game which no matter how much we hate them we can't change. People and businesses maximise their benefits/profits and adjust behavior accordingly. It's absolute basics but hey we don't like it. And get burned again and again.

Inflation is here to stay.
If BoE cuts rates next week pound will drop like a stone which means even higher inflation and even higher cost of servicing government debt.
Redundancies are coming and it's going to be way much harder for youngsters with no experience to find jobs.

Inflations with rising unemployment is not going to be pretty.

Yes, this seems to be a common theme too 😭 I’ve noticed this on tubs/bars of chocolate over Christmas!

Since 1980 CEO compensation has grown 1,400% (adjusted for inflation) and is now 100-150 x the average FT employees at the same companies

@RandomButtons If supermarkets made zero profit, the difference to your grocery bill would be tiny, a fiver a week.

Your pension would be in the shit as well. But at least supermarkets aren't 'milking consumers' so everyone's happy?

What’s tiresome? Why are you defending corporations milking consumers?

I’m happy to pay my part in taxes, I’m a net contributor to the system. If my pension pot rose 30% in a year but food prices stayed the same I’d be thrilled.

Around here I've noticed that both Lidl and Aldi have switched to electronic price tickets on the shelves, which draw the display price from the same system as the checkout till.

Much more accurate, and cheaper too - they don't have to pay someone to go around printing and sticking new stickers on the shelves every time a price changes. It's good to see that pricing labour out of existence is finally working.

BTW, with reference to earlier posts about hyperinflation, I remember 15-20 years ago in Zimbabwe when inflation hit the 11 million percent mark and nothing had display prices because items - if you could actually find any - could actually increase in price between picking it from the shelves and reaching the checkout. Anyone who thinks we are suffering hyperinflation in the UK is a prisoner of their own inexperience.

More stressful and competitive than being a A&E consultant or surgeon? I doubt it.

Either way - 1980 CEO compensation grown 1,400% (adjusted for inflation) and are now 100-150 x the average FT employees at the same companies.

Are they 1400% better?

You forgot "I want my pension investment to deliver growth to make me richer, but I don't want firms making profits."

I want excellent public services.
I want a generous welfare state.
I don't want to pay any higher taxes personally.
I want to buy my food cheap.

Oh, and I want someone else to pay for this all. Some rich buggers, individuals or corporations, just because they can.

It's tiresome.

That is my pet hate at my local Asda - prices at the till being considerably more than the shelf price (talking amounts like £1.25, £1.75 extra ect, always more and never less funnily enough).

I've complained so many times and don't believe it's accidental any more. I only buy a few items in Asda now and always use self checkout so I can check the price but wonder how much extra some customers pay without realising, especially with a big trolly shop.

Remember pension funds are likely to include Sainsbury’s in their portfolio either as stand alone or packaged options.

No profit to shareholders, no profit to pension funds. If you are in a DC scheme it’s possible your pot could be impacted.

I get prices have gone up, but we had incredibly low inflation for many years.

I remember the 1970s and, although you can’t do it today, bags of sugar would have 10 price stickers one on top of another, each showing the price going up every week.

This was August last year, £42 top up shop
I wanted to ask where the rest was

profit after tax isn’t the question here - the question is increase in profits. Feel free to do the maths on the increase of profits after tax if you’d like to. The point remains - they blame NI increases for the increase in food, when they’ve posted record profits. It doesn’t add up. They could have easily absorbed the increase and still posted record profits.

It's insane because Brits essentially won't eat any fish other than the 'big five' (cod, haddock, salmon, tuna, and prawns comprise over 90% of all fish/seafood consumption in the UK, and it is almost all imported into the bargain).

Things like horse mackerel, which is abundant and mostly caught in the Irish Sea, sells for €2 per kilo in Portugal at the height of the season, but almost impossible to find here.

One of the unsaid things about food price inflation is that Brits can no longer really afford to eat a lot of historically traditional food items which we regard almost as a birthright, but at the same time won't even consider some of the alternatives, never mind admit it.

I calculate that at this week’s prices, Tesco only need to sell 17.4 salmon fillets to pay the annual costs of the NI increase for their entire workforce. The price of fish is fucking insane.

Maybe you better look at their profit after tax? what they actually get in their (or probably yours as a pension holder) pockets?

Preliminary Results 2023/24

It's only £1.2bn, for the enterprise of that scale. Yes, it's significant growth but vs war-time cost rises of 2022/23, but still it's not extravagant at all for the business which employs 1% of total UK workforce.

Fill this pleb in oh wise one.

Plebs can be financially literate thank you very much

Fill us plebs in oh wise one.

It's really hard to get cheap food now

Yes the era of cheap food is over. There are more of us in the world and we all want to eat and its getting trickier to produce and distribute for a whole host of reasons (climate change, soil degradation, war, trade tariffs etc)

I am still very happy with Asda where I live.