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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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The reason it’s $11 for a dozen eggs certainly isn’t that the dollar has been ‘devalued’, it’s at near historic highs relative to most other developed world currencies. The reason eggs cost $11 in the US while they cost $4 or less in most of Western Europe is because of a combination of bird flu, price gouging (most farmers aren’t Democrats) and the fact that large, warehouse style US grocery stores cost much more to run in terms of electricity, and the US in general has far higher labor costs than the much more compact stores that exist in other countries and the workers they employ. Working class pay shot up across the board after Covid, many grocery store workers went from $9 an hour to $20 an hour, so food prices shot up because grocery stores are extremely low margin businesses in which any rise in costs is passed on to customers. If Tucker considers this a disaster, he should just come out and say it.

In general, the intellectual right have gone all in on accelerationism. They want ‘something’ to happen. It doesn’t really matter what that is, it just has to shake up ‘the system’. Unfortunately they fail to realize that ‘something’ in these cases is usually worse than the present. I’ll vote for Trump next November, but only because I personally dislike a lot of influential progressives and will enjoy the crying and wailing on social media if he wins (and perhaps in the faintest, 5% chance he might do something about immigration). He’s still almost certainly a criminal, a scumbag and will accomplish very little of what his supporters hope for if that happens.

And that is the point. Trump is the only proven vessel for any conservative faction to enter the White House since 2004. Everybody in the movement knows this. Whatever their ideological or political aims, they all depend on Trump. Whether you’re an energy lobbyist or an evangelical or a dissident rightist or a Wall Street business con, Trump is your only hope for your guys getting into the executive. A smart American elite would ensure Trump wasn’t sentenced before the election. But they too have to fight their ideological battles.

Like they protect Epstein until they have to murder him in his cell.

And Epstein probably did kill himself. He was a billionaire pervert whose main (other) hobbies were hanging out with influential people and travelling the world, and who was about to spend the rest of his life in solitary in a federal jail, without sex and without money. Many kill themselves in far less dire circumstances.

Epstein having his lawyers or associates bribe some prison staff to look the other way is vastly more likely than an assassination; if the ‘powers that be’ wanted to kill him, they would have done so discreetly long before he was arrested, especially given he was obviously under investigation for many years. There was no need to attempt an absurdly high risk hit in a high security jail in the middle of Manhattan when they could have arranged an entirely plausible accident any time over the preceding few years.

The motive is also lacking. Why would Epstein have talked? Was the US government going to give him a sweetheart deal and let him out in 2 years if he gave up Clinton and Trump? Clearly not, it’s a ridiculous suggestion (he wouldn’t have been able to provide proof the prosecutors didn’t otherwise have, so would have been accused of lying) and even if he had nothing to lose, he had nothing to gain either.

I’ll vote for Trump next November, but only because I personally dislike a lot of influential progressives and will enjoy the crying and wailing on social media if he wins (and perhaps in the faintest, 5% chance he might do something about immigration).

Setting aside the 'own the libs' part, you've got a better chance of immigration reform under Biden or his successor. Trump being Trump (or the media being the media, depending on your perspective), will inevitably make immigration reform so toxic that no democratic politician could support any proposal he makes without getting absolutely shredded by their base.

The reason eggs cost $11 in the US while they cost $4 or less in most of Western Europe is because of a combination of bird flu, price gouging (most farmers aren’t Democrats) and the fact that large, warehouse style US grocery stores cost much more to run in terms of electricity, and the US in general has far higher labor costs than the much more compact stores that exist in other countries and the workers they employ.

It's disorienting to see a litany of reasons trotted out to explain this "fact" when at my HCOL American grocery store I can buy eggs cheaper than the price you quote for Western Europe. Do Europeans really believe this?

price gouging

Working class pay shot up across the board after Covid

So those basically aren't happening in the EU, or what?

The reason it’s $11 for a dozen eggs certainly isn’t that the dollar has been ‘devalued’, it’s at near historic highs relative to most other developed world currencies. The reason eggs cost $11 in the US while they cost $4 or less in most of Western Europe

They cost $4 or less in most of the US, Tucker is as usual just lying.

(by any reasonable definition of 'lying')

The reason eggs cost $11 in the US while they cost $4 or less in most of Western Europe is because of a combination of bird flu, price gouging (most farmers aren’t Democrats) and the fact that large, warehouse style US grocery stores cost much more to run in terms of electricity, and the US in general has far higher labor costs than the much more compact stores that exist in other countries and the workers they employ.

Egg cost aside, is the latter part of this something you actually believe? That American grocery stores are expensive to run because of electricity and this results in high price of goods? I want to make sure this is a serious claim before doing any actual reading, because at a glance it sounds like an absolutely ridiculous claim to me.

It’s actually a commonly discussed topic in the global supermarket and FMCG business because the cost of fresh produce and indeed the majority of even shelf-stable goods is upwards of 50-100% higher in the US than in much of Western Europe. Identical groceries that cost $50 in the UK can cost $100 or more in HCOL regions of the US. Freight costs alone don’t explain it, the most common explanation within the business is indeed that the much larger average square footage of eg. a Kroger in the US vs a Tesco in the UK and associated higher costs are a core part of the reason, plus higher margins across the supply chain.

What’s your explanation for why groceries cost less than 1/2, sometimes 1/3 of what they do in the US in Germany?

This makes no sense at all. There are economies of scale involved, which is why there are supermarkets in the first place. Smaller stores are more expensive, not less.

Looking at the G20, American fruit prices look unremarkable. Vegetables appear higher, but not anything like two or three times the cost, and still lower than the differences in incomes. Meat prices appears somewhat lower.

This is genuinely one of the weirder claims that I've seen recently. Small grocery stores definitely don't tend to be cheaper than large supermarkets. If there is some actual data that I'm missing, I would find it pretty interesting, but I genuinely don't know where the idea that American groceries are super expensive is coming from.

Small grocery stores definitely don't tend to be cheaper than large supermarkets.

The opposite tends to be true, in fact.

It’s a longstanding question. From The Economist (via stackexchange):

A study in 2017 by the un’s Food and Agriculture Organisation found that the cost of eating healthily in America was 65% more than in Britain, and among the highest in the rich world

...

Why are American consumers not getting a better deal? A transatlantic comparison is revealing. Walmart, which accounts for about 26% of the American market, has a gross margin (its profit before fixed costs like rent and labour are taken into account) of about 25%. For Tesco, Britain’s largest chain, which has 27% of its home market, the equivalent figure is 8%. Since the two firms both have low net margins (overall profitability), this suggests that Walmart has higher fixed costs, and has to charge a big mark-up.

This shifts from "cost of produce" to "eating healthily", which are not clearly interchangeable, and the latter is a questionable category altogether. Your previous posts included "much of Western Europe" and specifically called out Germany as a place with half to one third the cost, but the article you just linked shows France on par and Germany/Spain within ~10%. As percentages of income, these are all higher than what Americans are spending. The article also doesn't reference electric use at all.

I think I'm going to settle on the idea that electric use in supermarkets doubles the price of produce being one of those weird things that some Europeans decide to believe about the States for inscrutable reasons.

Rafa’s half-american and atypical in any case. This all started when an american claimed a dozen eggs costs 11 dollars. Europeans are not aware of this, much less speculating on it, so leave us out of it. If I had to throw a guess for the somewhat higher prices, it would be the massive choice americans seem to prefer. Aldi and lidl are famous for cutting costs by having only one or two of each thing, but even regular european supermarkets do not compare to the diversity offered by american supermarkets in peanut butter flavours and the like.

Eggs in particular are kind of weird. Depending on your perspective, they can be either a fancy food (nice eggs benedict at a fancy brunch restaurant) or a cheap food (substituting eggs in place of beef, which has also gone up in price a lot). Then there's like two dozen varities at any supermarket, for cage free, organic, etc, which frankly leave me baffled which one I should choose. There isn't any one "price of eggs."

Indeed. Baumol cost disease seems a rather more likely reason.

This is hitting Arrested Development levels out here people.

Eggs are not $11/doz because of price gouging or bird flu or operating costs or any other reason, they just aren't $11! Go to Target.com, search for a dozen eggs. Here's the large cage free ones: $2.59. Price fairly consistent across multiple locations.

Seriously. What are we even talking about here?

/images/1702553232279261.webp

Yeah, ‘eggs are $11/dozen’ is clearly false to me; I’d believe that the Whole Foods in San Francisco is selling free range organic brown eggs for that price, but not much else.

Seriously. What are we even talking about here?

There was a period of time where, among a certain set, "high egg prices" was a synecdoche for high inflation and rising prices more generally. Tucker's reference here is probably not to convey that he literally pays $11/dozen for eggs but something closer to "prices high, economy bad."

Damn those are some cheap eggs. Here in the UK they're like 50% more expensive.

It was a thing earlier in the year when prices spiked because of bird flu, but they seem to have come down now. Presumably Tucker doesn’t regularly buy eggs and so remembered some headline rather than commenting on the actual situation.

Tucker was probably just using irresponsible hyperbole. But I've been buying eggs every week for years. I've never paid more than $5 a dozen. There may be weird parts of the country where there were shortages, but that just wasn't a thing in most of the country, for ANY reason.

The use of "$11" suggests to me that it wasn't intended as a literal claim. Unfortunately, egg prices were actually high enough at one point that you probably could have spent $11 if you insisted on Whole Foods eggs at the height of localized shortages, so the claim could be taken literally. Realistically, this seems more like me saying, "with Joe Biden as President, ground beef is now $37/pound". I don't know, maybe it's just that Tucker's completely out of touch with grocery store pricing, that wouldn't surprise me all that much.

price gouging (most farmers aren’t Democrats)

Ah come on, that's a cheap shot. The large agribusiness producers may or may not vote Republican, but I see no reason why - as with Silicon Valley - they can't vote Democrat while enjoying the fruits of capitalism.

Small farmers are squeezed on the margins, and aren't most farm workers/labourers in the USA migrants anyway, who would be the Democratic voting bloc?

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