Most people don’t understand what inflation is or does.
The value of the food isn’t going up. An carton of eggs and a litre of milk aren’t any more filling or nutritious today than they were a decade ago. Their value has remained constant.
Its the value of the pound that is falling. They don’t think so because a pound is still worth the same against the dollar or the euro, but they are all falling at they same time, in unison, so the people all around the world have the same problems and don’t realise the scale of what is actually happening.
When the population as a whole eventually realises what is happening to their money, it will be too late for them to protect themselves. They’ll just panic.
Its gonna get a worse before it gets better, and prices do not go down again once the money has already been printed and put into the economy.
Interest rates need to go into double figures like they did in the 70’s. It’s gonna be rough for small businesses and the service sector who live entirely off the surplus wealth in the economy. When your entire job depends on people splashing their spare cash, you know you picked the wrong job for recession/depression era.
People tend to feed their children before they get their nails done or buy a latte. Unfortunate if you do nails or sell lattes, but it’s not like you didn’t see this coming three years ago.
TBH, the people who are gonna hurt the most are the middle class country bumpkins who earn their money professionally in a changing world, have mortgaged themselves more than 4x a joint salary that might go down to one salary, paid to live in a nice expensive neighbourhood, drive two cars that don’t need MOTs because they are that new, and haven’t got a years worth of salaries in the bank in savings to get them through.
They are gonna hurt a damn site more because they have a lot further to fall, and in their world of predictable economic models, they did not allow for a market crash that is global in scale.
For those already not using their heating (or only heating one room), meal planning, no longer buying red meat, and living on a lot of soups, worse times are gonna be a struggle, but for the most part they’re used to the struggle and find it easier to deal with. We’ll just get together and shape like we did in the 70’s. You bring what you’ve got. I’ll bring what I’ve got, and together we’ll feed all our kids.
We’ll get through it. We always do. What’s more, the UK will be a lot more equal for it. Except for the stinking rich of course, because they have already protected themselves.