Will food prices go down again or is this it?

[UserNameSameGame]

I was reading something about how the majority of the inflation cost is food and power costs, and how that is disproportionately affecting anyone at the lower end of the income range. So someone on e.g. £30k is seeing 10-15% inflation, but someone on £200k is only seeing 3-4% because proportionally less of the things purchased are affected.

I am also shocked at how much food has gone up by. Obviously I knew it had gone up a lot, but I usually get a weekly delivery so didn’t really attribute it to things we weren’t regularly buying. Yesterday I had to pop into the supermarket to get something we had run out of, and randomly browsed the isles. A year ago I would have ended up with a dozen additional things in the basket but this time I was so put off by the prices.

So the question is, will food prices come down again eventually, or will we just have to wait until wages at some point catch up? And if the latter, does that mean that non-essentials will have proportionally gone down?

@Mintakan You can’t blame the war when the UK is the only one seeing these hugely inflated food costs.

I live in Europe and whilst we’ve seen a slight increase because of the war, it’s nothing like it is in the UK.

Surely part has to do with the UK having had ridiculously low supermarket prices compared to other countries in Europe over the past decade or so.

I don't think prices will go down but salaries might start to go up.

They will go down eventually, we've seen this before, but they certainly won't go down as fast as they have risen.

It's been reported that they will continue to increase this year but will hit their peak.

It’s won’t be supermarkets profiting or anyone really, as the costs of production are still going up - labour, seeds, inputs

The steady increase in food prices was predictable the moment we went into lockdown. You have politicians saying ‘get used to the new normal’. You have huge swathes of society getting free money for contributing absolutely nothing to society. 80% of their salaries to do nothing! You have supermarkets all of a sudden having to employ thousands of pickers, warehouse staff, delivery vans and drivers, and at the same time unable to process customers in store at the rate at which they previously did.

Where do you think all this money was going to come from? We don’t grow magic money trees in our country. We breed taxpayers. They pay for it either through higher taxes or higher prices. If the supermarket picks up the cost it goes on the food prices. If the government pays for it it creates inflation. So we get a bit of both.

And it’s already happened. We already demanded and got the free handouts. Now we gotta pay for it.

So next time you see people asking for this price cap or that hand out, ask yourself how you’re going to pay for it, because it will come out of your pocket one way or another in the end. Even if you can’t think ahead and see why.

... and where will that money come from? Where does a company get the money from to increase salaries? From reducing overheads and employee numbers? Or by increasing prices still further? And what do those salaried employees do with their money then? Cut back on spending and try to save a little to give themselves a safety net? I.e. spend less into the economy because they know they’ll need the money in the future.

When have we seen this before?
Just an approximate time for reference.

Anytime inflation has been high - look back over the last 40 years, the data is available. Sure, they may not have been this high, but they go up, they come down, they go up, they come down. As does everything else. Doesn't mean they will return to the previous prices but they will eventually decrease from where they are. Probably not during 2023 though.

It won’t be a popular view, but we’ve benefitted from very cheap food prices in the UK for a long time, to the detriment of the farming industry. If we want home-produced food, no, I don’t think it’s realistic to expect that food prices will come down.

Never is history have we had the ability (or the stupidity) to inflate the money supply infinitely, though. The only reason we could do it without suffering the consequences of total destruction of our trade with the rest of the world, is because the whole of the rest of the world inflated their money supply in tandem to keep the relative trade values between countries the same. It’s irreversible and permanent. The only thing we can do now is change the way we measure things, hide the inflation with a convenient money change, or stuff it under the mattress of war economy and doing our bit.

People want cheap stuff, but they are never willing to pay for it. We want five pairs of socks for £10. We pretend we care about who makes them and how they are treated, but at the end of the day we don’t. It’s all just virtue signalling to make ourselves feel good. We don’t care where our food or our phones come from or what they cost in life or limb to the people who supply them, just so long as they are cheap and we can live the lives of luxury we have come to expect. We have the richest ‘poor people’ on the planet with the highest standard of living in the world, and still we complain and roll out the entitlement card. We want... We deserve... We’re entitled to. Are we really entitled to cheap avocados more than the people who farm them are entitled to hygiene and healthcare? Why do we believe that we are entitled to mobile phones and internet access and TV subscriptions over feeding our children healthy food and keeping them warm and dry?

Maybe if we are actually asked to pay the real cost of what we believe we are entitled to, we would find that some of our entitlements are just luxuries, and the money we pittance we spend on the those could be spent on discovering what the essentials are in our lives.

Bravo!

I have been saying this for ages! People need to travel responsible and look around. If they see what in other countries is payed for food (and put it in context with local wages) they will understand how spoiled we are here.
Sadly, many people do not understand the difference between Want and Need.

Monkeysmum21
Sadly, many people do not understand the difference between Want and Need.

Maybe 1 in 100 understand the difference between ‘want’ and ‘need’.
Maybe over the next few years the rest will find out.
Then hopefully we’ll raise a generation of adults without this entitlement mentality.

... or maybe we’ll all just text eachother, come online and complain about how we can’t afford food and did you watch Strictly?

Who pissed on your chips?

Where are you getting the “entitlement mentality” from?

External pressures aside I think prices will come down to some extent because the big brands who have raised their prices over and above what is necessary to exploit the economic situation will find themselves losing their client base.

If Heinz soup is 1.70 a tin and Aldi 60p - then many people will end up trying it out. They may compare the ingredients and find there is no difference in sugar or salt or indeed protein.....and so change brand.

Eventually Heinz will be forced to drop prices in order to recapture their market.

Well that's my theory.

The big brands are profiteering.

Most of the unbranded goods in the cheaper outlets are manufactured by the same bid brands. But they do so at nominal margin and make their profits with the branded goods.

In your hypothesis, at best big brands will be forced to lower prices on the branded goods and compensate by raising prices on the unbranded goods, meeting somewhere in the middle as it were.

But this also cannot happen in reality, because discount stores will lose their competitive edge, and before that happens will cease stocking goods that rise too quickly in price, and whichever way you cut it, you cannot get away from the fact that fuel and energy and fertiliser and grain costs are all rising astronomically fast and we have no intention of doing anything to stop it.

What will happen is people’s diets will change. We will not eat as much meat as we do because the price will continue to rise. We will not consume as much dairy. We will eat more beans and root vegetables. Food is still heavily subsidised in this country. Without the money being pumped into farming from central government our food prices get very real very quickly.

I’m fairly sure that food prices went down in 2009/2010 after they’d gone up in 2008. So maybe.

Until the price of energy, petrol and diesel reduce substantially, I can't see shop prices coming down.
Retailers and manufacturers will just keep taking as much profit as they can for as long as possible.

Energy, petrol and diesel are never returning to the cheap rates we have during Covid. We already inflated the money supply or did you miss that bit? We created 3 out of every 4 pounds of extra money in the last four years, but we forgot to create 4 times as much diesel and petrol and gas. So there is not a lot less commodities relative to the abundance of cash swimming around out there.

For the most part prices aren’t rising at all. It’s the value of your pound that is falling. Every day your pounds are worth less and less because more and more of them get freed up from where they were dumped over the past few years. And every time we ask the government to dump more and more money into the economy, we just keep adding to the money supply without making any more stuff to buy, so the prices just keep going up and up.

Now, if they hiked the BoE base rate to 12% maybe they can stop the inflation, but they don’t have the nerve to face to populous, and the people would rather bury their heads in the sand than pay the piper for all the money printing. But then it’s their choice.

Why does everyone ignore the fact you need to pay people to grow/produce food? Do you not think people who work in factories, pick food, sew and grow food etc. deserve to be paid a fair wage? If so you need to pay more for your food.

It has come down to end of 2021 levels. I just checked (because I have no concept of what is a reasonable price for things anymore!) And it was around 125p per litre for unleaded before lockdown. Gradually getting there. Though diesel prices are still bonkers.

I agree with the concept of this but big brand manufacturers in the UK are hiking the price of their goods and creaming off the additional profit for themselves. I think many people are ok with paying a fair price but when that money is lining the pockets of big businesses yet again, they feel pissed off.

I think there's opportunistic price rises too. I can't believe supermarkets are not putting up the price of things that aren't affected.

I have to buy non dairy milk for DC. Before xmas it was £1.90 for a carton. Then veganuary saw it on sale at £1.40. great! But this week it's back in the shop at £2.10. yes we could say the ingredients are affected by the war, but my cynical side says that they hope a bunch of new vegans would like it during veganuary and wouldn't realise that £2.10 is 30p more expensive than it was a few weeks ago. For standard users I think they use the price drop as a reset so they can up the price later because they think we've forgotten.

A lot of our food was underpriced before so no

Where’s the evidence of this?