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?

I agree with this

The increase in food prices is mainly down to the cost of power, labour and inputs, not furlough payments!

Ukraine, climate change and Brexit have all massively affected food prices in the U.K. unfortunately, I can't see any of those situations changing in the short-term.

Really enjoying your input, ElliF.

OP, nobody's pissed on anyone's chips. You're getting an insightful analysis of an issue you raised.

We’re all entitled to our opinions. @ElliF is entitled to hers, and I am entitled to mine, which is that half of what she raises is actually really fascinating insight, but the other half is bizarre ranting and arguing against some unseen foe. Maybe I just dislike her assumption that everyone else is stupid.

I agree with OP in that we all have our own opinions. We form those opinions based on the information we gather, then plan how we will negotiate the future based on our conclusions.

Some people, and you only need to follow many of the threads on MN, or look at the people the press roll out, don’t bother to look at the world around them, ask questions, think for themselves, and work out what may be happening and how that might affect them in the future. They just don’t care. Or it’s too hard.

These are the people who inevitably blame the government or the corporations or Mr Putin or whoever their preferred bogey men are at the time they realise they FU by not planning for the future a decade ago, or a year ago, or indeed last week. It’s someone else’s fault in their little world that they have an issue with their food or their money or whatever.

Others can see higher energy bills and higher food prices and no wage growth in the future and they are planning for that now. They buy less, wear more clothes, keep the heating off, shop in charity shops, whatever, because a penny saved is a penny earned and all that.

If they are wrong they are wrong. They have lived on less than they did before and have saved money for the future, and they have learned to live on less than everyone else. But if they are right, they are not the ones who have to learn how not to starve and freeze in a crisis.

...

With food prices, you have the following components that go to make up the total cost of your product.

The manpower involved in farming the raw ingredients
The fuel involved in farming the raw ingredients
The maintenance costs of any associated farming machinery
The rental and/or maintenance costs of any storage facility
The manpower involved in sorting, packing, cleaning and processing those raw ingredients
The material cost of the packing materials for those ingredients
The management overheads and insurances carried by the raw ingredient processor.
The fuel involved in moving those raw ingredients to the food manufacturer
The maintenance cost of the haulage vehicle
The insurances carried by the haulier

That could be raw beans from field to 1 tonne pallet landed at a factory.

I can go on and make you a list of maybe 100 more items that get you to a can of baked beans on a shelf.

Not a single one of those components is ever going to go down in price.
Unless we figure out how to remove humans from the supply chain and put them on the dole, none of the wage elements or the need to insure and indemnify them against injury or death is ever going to get cheaper. The same goes for the steel or aluminium that makes the can, the film that lines the can, the printed label on the can, etc. All manufactured on a hundred different machined with a 1000 different people. All wanting more pay, all costing more to insure, all working on machines that are maintained by people who want more pay, using spare parts that cost more to source and move and manufacture.

Every single step adding just a fraction of a fraction of a penny, but all adding up the the total cost and the move higher in food prices. And none of them going down so long as people believe they are entitled to be paid more for doing the same job this year that they did five years ago ‘because inflation’.

When people really start to feel the pain, the will also start to think. But of course by then it will be too late. Right now, many don’t need to, and so they don’t.

While some may take a pot shot at OP, or me, at least OP is asking the questions, forming her opinions, and presumable planning ahead just in case.

Kudos to OP for that.

Proportionately they can and do. For example clothing became much cheaper than it was when I was a kid and I'm fifty.

A big issue for food prices is Brexit. We've taken so much for granted over the years.

Good example.

Clothing used to be made here and on the continent by people who earned wages and lived in houses and had health care and food, and we accepted that and paid the money.

Then we moved textiles to the the east, and now you buy clothes made by slave children in sweatshops, sleeping in dorm rooms with a bowl for a toilet, no sanitation and no healthcare.

Yes, you can buy a jumper for £5, and you can still pretend you care about child slavery and women’s health, but we all know that is just virtue signalling and the extent to which we really care about other people’s children and other people’s health is limited so long as we can still buy cheap clothes.

So, yes, clothes prices have dropped, and no you don’t care about WHY clothes prices have dropped, and of course those are all going up in price now too, but now that they are all already made by slave labour, what are you going to do now to make clothes prices go down again? Build concentration camps and round up communities for the work camps?

Do you ever ask yourself, how can I possibly be buying 5 pairs of socks for £10? Do you care?

Food in the UK was very cheap before. I don't really want the price of meat and dairy to go down.

I certainly don’t want the price of processed sugar to go down. Tax the fuck out of processed sugar I say. It’s healthier to eat an apple than a chocolate bar.