Rising Prices

Inflation at 3.2% last month. Food more expensive, cars more expensive, bicycles, computer games, eating out, drinking out…

Is anything other than Andre Gray going down in price?

 

Find any bargains, post them here!

 

I bought a new pre-workout from Home Bargains for £5.99 last night as usual my MyProtein one had run out and was out of stock. The content, taste and affects are good and I now may never go back.

Suck that, inflation.

 

Masks are cheaper

 

Cool. There are bargains out there people.

I have to say the blackberries have been awesome this year. Local produce and they cost eff all squared.

 

Not looking great is it? Inflation, tax rises coming everywhere from April (unless you are a pensioner of course). NI up, dividends tax up, corporation tax up. The Tories are gunning for the workers.

Add to that Brexit, and massive supply chain issues.

I'm not sure it's possible for a government to mess up this much. A cabinet of chimpanzees making random decisions would have more favorable outcomes.

 

Keep it light m8.

 

Have you seen the price of Chimpanzees lately?

 

You need to be paying in peanuts m8.

 

If we're going to lock down the world, stop all industry and transportation from flowing, send everyone home for 18 months, then inflation is one of many obvious consequences to be expected out the other side

Everything starts off in the wrong place - people, ships, trucks, trains, raw materials... when manufacturing does start to flow it is sold for the highest cost to the markets paying the most as business tries to recoup losses

Several of us did try to point these things out last year

Coming out of lockdown needed to be managed if anything more carefully than going in to lockdown

 

The way in which those supply shortages hit home is more local though. We would clearly be having supply problems without Covid.

Moreover, Covid has also unbalanced the economy further. Lots of people on universal credit and others with lots of disposable cash. Lots of competition for goods.

The next whammy is a hike in energy prices.

I shouldn’t be surprised that despite the millions dead Worldwide you are still anti-lockdown. There’s a touch of the Malthus in you.

 

I don’t even have to look at the data to know more people die of smoking, alcohol, and obesity related illness than covid, and yet no direct action equivalent to lockdown on any of them

I’d say I simply have a differing and better set of priorities

 

How many times do you need it explained that the number of people dying of Covid was depressed by the lockdown? You can’t then say ‘not that many died’ (though it was plenty). That was the point.

Just watch the latest series of ‘Ambulance’ to get an idea of how stretched the NHS was with the lockdown we had. That people were dying of all sorts waiting for ambulances when the system was utterly overloaded.

And you wanted to let it loose? What would the economy have looked like then?

 

Season ticket with Watford cheaper than last time we were in the Prem

 

If they were paying me it would be too expensive.

 

I'd say that you've possibly not considered the whole picture, the measures that averted a bigger disaster or had an interaction with anyone that worked in the NHS during the period. The miser most experienced was awful. The country didn't mobilise the largest peacetime measures for nothing and they were largely succesful. You have a different set of priorities but better?, the majority would probably disagree.

As an asside and to clairify my thinking, direct taxation on alcohol and tobacco more than pay for the costs they cause to the NHS and that's before considering secondary revenue raised from income, corporation, business tax and satelite businesses. Checkout sites like full fact.org as well as the link I provided. There's no sensible way to raise revenue on a virus to pay for the fallout it caused. O

Of course looking at it just considering monetary terms is very shallow, any preventable death is regrettable, but it is worth remembering that a proportion of the revenue raised does go towards education and prevention and would the cost be higher if lives were prolonged and care needed to be provided into older age?

 

The other thing to expect is a good round of ‘shrinkflation’, where product sizes decrease to avoid price rises.

A nightmare for crisp lovers everywhere, so every cloud etc. FTAOD crisps are lovely.

 

Not as cheap as Spain. I just bought a pack of 5 masks for €0.40! Now that's a bargain.

 

Well I can honestly say I've just come back from Spain with the wife and we went out for dinner with a bottle or two of wine. Then went to a bar where I bought two buckets of Sol, so 10 bottles and the Mrs stayed on the wine. This cost less than us going out for four drinks each in Norway.

 

The costs - certainly of alcohol - don't solely fall on the NHS, though.

 

Sol tends to rise in the morning and fall in the evening

 

Amen, brother.

 

Like myself.

 

There were inflationary pressures building in the economy prior to lockdown. Worldwide disruption due to the pandemic has had a huge impact on commodities and in particular imported goods. Demand has also impacted prices, as people have switched purchases. Ask any tradesperson and they will tell you that they are flat out building, upgrading and replacing. But as many know those purchases brought forward will lead to a big dip in demand in 18 months time, that will have an effect on dampening inflation.

BREXIT pressures have been building too, but it could be worse. The government also reduced VAT on many purchases, but that is due to revert. And of course the government went to magic money tree and made more money than was borrowed during the 2008 financial crisis. That suppressed the cost of money, which of course is the biggest driver of inflation in the economy. For example house price inflation over the last 18 months has dwarfed the impact of supermarket inflation.

As to things going down in price. This years reduction in mortality has reduced the liabilities of pension funds. So the cost of providing pensions, state, company and private have gone down.

 

I appreciate you are surveying in the abstract, but the effect of those increases, because we import so much of what we need and because energy is a huge amount of anyone on universal credit’s income, is going to be very hard this winter. It’s badly needed that the supply chain is fixed.

 

Still, if there was any fruit and veg in the shops you could now buy it in imperial measures.

 

Who's going to adopt that though? I can't see any of the major supermarkets going for it and so surely it's just 'roll up, roll up cor-blimey-guv'nor' market stall traders who are ****-a-hoop.

 

It’s clearly culture war cobblers for the benefit of the elderly vote and no sane business in the World is going to start calculating in 12s, 14s whatever for the sake of it.

But in terms of language it’s fine. A pint doesn’t have to mean a specific imperial measurement for most people. It’s that number of centilitres we feel comfortable drinking.

In this respect we are bilingual as a nation. Sensibly metric, poetically speaking in lbs. The World will look on as if it’s just more Harry Potter and go there there.

 

Huzzah, a return to a system of weights and measures that haven't been taught in UK schools since 1973!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Bit of advice if it's ok. Could you recommend a pre workout drink or supplement to use? As I get older the more unmotivated or rundown I feel before I even start training. Any help would be very helpful.

 

Home working and social distancing can work without lock downs. Calming people rather than scare mongering would positively effect the health service, whereby people would not be troubling the NHS because they thing they are going to die to COVID (having flu symptoms that could easily be dealt with at home, rather than panic admissions to hospital).

And it would help if mpeople would not rely on the dramatisation of (non) reality tv playing on people's frailties to make their programme more compelling by saying that we are on the edge because of covid. Just like they dramatise the mundane with "and if the Landlord says he won't sell Bob a pint right now (cue dramatic music), then its all over for Bob trying to buy a pint in this pub, and all his efforts will be for nothing." Particularly obvious what they are doing when the landlord then says "The usual Bob?"

I would have thought that Panorama and its eight Labour activists lying through their teeth would have given a clue as to the 'compelling drama' that TV content providers are adicted to.

 

No, I’ve read it twice and I’m none the wiser as to where this fits in on this thread.

 

I think you’ve had Bob’s pint(s)

 

Today
I've had Bobs, and Derrick's, and Paul's.....

 

I'm sure there won't be any complications there are all considering a high percentage of supermarket workers are still at school/university.