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Food
(hexbear.net)
https://x.com/NathanJRobinson/status/1800915894585147399
Krugman, despite being a neoliberal knows that food is an essential item. So likely he is propagandizing for Biden.
Look at personal savings rate.
Perhaps the most egregious part of this is that the graph shows dollar expenditures, not meals bought.
It's common for companies to raise prices to increase revenue, even if raising prices results in fewer people buying your product. This shit is taught in high school economics. Absolutely nothing here shows anything about how many people can afford fast food.
Also, the other thing is to look at with this is people eating out generally, there could also be the phenomena of middle class people responding to increased prices by eating fast food more to substitute more expensive take out options.
Another factor is people could generally be living further from work now than 10 years ago due to higher rents. Meaning they're more likely to eat a meal near their office while having less time to cook, hence needing fast food.
This was kind of my first thought. I eat out more when I'm stressed because of the comfort of eating out and the lack of energy to cook for myself, even if it puts me in a worse economic situation. Sometimes you have to cope just to keep alive. Maybe we can coin the term "copeanomics" to describe increased sales of "luxury" items in times of increased societal instability.
There probably is already an industry term for it, because it's basically the fast food indutry's entire business model.
I have coworkers who purchase takeout food and/or coffee every single day despite their having literally no money (one coworker actually ran out of money one day and refused like five offers from me to buy him lunch) so I’ve been wondering about this. I make my own lunch and coffee and save immense amounts of money from doing so, but this may also be a form of privilege.
And don’t forget good ol’ fashioned doomspending. If you’ll never afford a house and aren’t even sure you’ll still be able to afford rent in the distant future, why bother saving that $12? Just go ahead and treat yourself to the overpriced burg while you still can.
I thought so too, but look at the y axis. These are inflation adjusted, to 2017 dollars
as people in the replies to Stancil (linked by Parsani below) mention, the CPI adjustment is based on overall inflation, not inflation of restaurant prices specifically, so it's still flawed IMO since I believe restaurant (especially fast food) price inflation significantly outpaces overall inflation.
Even adjusting for inflation, it's common to raise prices to increase revenue (consumer expenditures). There are business people all over the world right now drawing up graphs of how much total revenue they can generate at different price points, and low price/mass sales is not a good approach for many companies.
This is an important point, because prices are set largely by what people are willing to pay, not costs + whatever margin a company picks, for example. Tons of right-wing media pretends industry does rudimentary cost + margin pricing to push talking points like "if our business has to pay one cent more in taxes or wages that will ultimately be paid by consumers," which is preposterous theoretically and has been disproven by real data over and over.
Basically: sale price is determined by what company thinks maximizes overall profit, cost of product (including shrink) determines whether the product is carried at all. It's something I bring up in the shoplifting debate a lot, as people assume it increases price of individual items. Of course shrink plays a role when businesses make decisions, but why would a business charge you less than you're willing to pay for an item?