Do You Know the Other Four Forms of Inflation?
Do You Know the Other Four Forms of Inflation?
Price increases aren't the only way corporations are looting your wealth
If you received a 5% pay raise this year, you received a 10% pay cut this year.
The government’s official inflation numbers are a bald-faced lie, and everyone honest knows it.
(These days, smart people calculate their own inflation rate.)
Greedy anti-human corporate sellers are responsible for 100% of the inflation that’s currently hurting the masses and crushing the poor, but believe it or not, raising prices isn’t the only way they’re stealing from you right now.
Do you know the other four forms of inflation that are eroding your wealth and undermining your future?
Let’s dig in.
1. Shrinkflation
When I was a teenager, I used to work as a baker at Tim Horton’s, which is this horrific not-fair-trade coffee chain in wildly-corrupt Canada.
A few weeks after I started, Timmie’s introduced visibly smaller donuts. They arrived frozen in giant cardboard boxes and we heated them up in a microwave oven. We still had some old ones, and we could physically compare the difference in size.
Regardless of the truth or the scientific facts, our slimy manager trained us with a corporate-supplied script on how to lie to customers. We literally kept a laminated sheet beside the till. “No, sir/ma'am, our donut size hasn’t changed, we’re just using a new oven and icing so it appears that way.”
(For the record, I refused and told people the truth when they complained. They appreciated the honesty and usually gave me a tip. Which I desperately needed, because my millionaire boss paid me just C$6.40 per hour.)
There’s a word for shrinking donut sizes:
Shrinkflation is everywhere.
That’s why companies like Coke constantly tweak their bottle shapes, to simulate volume.
Our local grocery store sells eggs in ten packs instead of a dozen.
The list is massive.
So not only are your prices going up, but the quantity you’re receiving for those inflated prices is going down.
Shrinkflation is a really sick and twisted idea.
Instead of raising prices by 20%, just cut the product size by 20%.
Voila — 20% savings, 20% profit gain.
Or they cut the size by 10% and raise prices by 10%.
Or they just under-fill your products and hope they get away with it.
2. Bulkflation
You used to be able to buy family-sized versions of everything.
You could go to any standard American grocery store and buy, say, 50 pounds of flour or 50 pounds of rice.
Now, you’re lucky to find a one-pound bag of flour or anything more than a single microwavable serving of rice.
That’s because bulk items typically sell at commodity prices.
I buy my jalapenos direct from a Mexican restaurant wholesaler for $6.99 per 12-pound tin. Tiny jars of wildly-inferior jalapenos sell at my local grocery store for $2.17… four times the bulk price.
50 pounds of rice might retail for, say, $50, and a giant box of frozen chicken breasts might retail for say, $25, but fifty single-serving grab-and-go rice and chicken dinners sell for $6.99 a pop… seven times the bulk price.
Our corporate overlords know that bulk pricing isn’t profitable.
Single-serving is wildly profitable.
Instead of providing real value to customers, they’re simply maximizing private profits for their greedy shareholders.
3. Qualityflation
One of my favorite subreddits is r/BuyItForLife, which reminds humanity that goods like clothing and appliances and technology were once manufactured to last a full human lifetime or longer.
These days, items are purposefully designed to break down quickly.
Often, they’re designed to be irreparable.
Some corporations even try to make it illegal to repair or buy after-market parts for their products, claiming patent infringement and other lawyer-concocted legal fictions.
It’s called planned obsolescence, and some countries are rightly trying to make it illegal. (Ever had a phone or computer grind to a halt after a forced update? That’s planned obsolescence.)
Qualityflation is everywhere.
My friend Theaker still drives his grandfather’s Model T to the county fair every summer. You think his grandson will be driving a 2022 Tesla? There is literally zero chance. Classic cars from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s still abound, yet will anyone be driving a 2022 Ford, Honda, or Chevy? No, because their quality is decreasing year after year.
This is especially true for houses. A family used to be able to build a home of stone in a matter of weeks and it would last the family for centuries. Now, houses are built of wooden sticks, covered in vinyl siding.
My friend Michael has a waxed wool jacket that’s nearly a century old, yet many women I know buy fast fashion from H&M and it falls apart in a matter of weeks.
This is purposeful corporate behavior.
Michael (and his son, and grandson) will likely never buy another winter jacket, whereas corporations need him to buy a new one every single winter.
Don’t even get me started on qualityflation in post-secondary “education.”
4. Subscriptionflation
The absolute worst trend in customer-gouging definitely goes to the new and unbelievably dangerous business model called Subscription Serfdom.
Instead of allowing customers to purchase goods outright, corporations illegally monopolize their products and just rent them to their customers instead.
My wife could once purchase the Adobe Creative Cloud suite for around $500 — now it will cost her $40,000 in monthly fees over the course of her graphic design career.
For the same $#!t.
The product doesn’t provide any more value for the customer, it just extracts more wealth up to the billionaire monopolist who owns the cartel.
Subscription Serfdom will become economically lethal to the working class when corporations partner with financial firms to securitize their products.
In other words, a mattress that once sold for $800 is worth $3600 to a rent-seeking predator investment firm if you can rent it to a pleb for $100/month on a three-year contract.
Suddenly, no one can afford to buy anything outright, and a corporation has gained a dependent customer for life.
This, inevitably, will destroy an untold number of jobs, and more importantly, it will vaporize working-class wealth and drive us into corporate serfdom.
We’re on the road to serfdom
Price increases.
Shrinking quantities.
One-serving products.
Rapidly decreasing quality.
The insidious move from ownership to rentership.
These are the five types of inflation we’re currently enduring.
It’s eroding our wealth and undermining our future.
Plus, when bills pile higher and real wages fall, people start to compromise their morals and values and go against what’s right. They become land-lorders or Airbnb hosts. They hop on Robinhood and extract wealth from the working poor. They join a Ponzi scheme like Bitcoin or Tesla.
The rest just bury their heads in the sand and pretend they aren’t getting raked by all five types of inflation.
Because it happens so gradually, it doesn’t seem like a big deal.
That’s what happens when you live in a boiling frog economy.
Though each form of inflation might not seem like a big deal in isolation, when you add them together and then chart their trajectory for the next twenty years, you realize the massive danger of these illegal and immoral actions.
From punching the numbers, we know that the hyper-rich will get so rich that they will literally own the entire economy within our lifetime, and the rest of us will be time-slaves and neo-feudal serfs.
We must resist.
How to fight all five forms of inflation
To fight price increases, shrinking quantities, one-serving products, rapidly decreasing quality, and the insidious move from ownership to rentership, there’s only one thing we can do:
Stop doing business with predator corporations.
That’s it.
That’s the tweet.
Stop doing business with predator corporations.
Why?
Because predator corporations like Uber and Airbnb use their predator profits to hire predator lawyers to lobby predator politicians to pass predatory policies that further prey on the productive class.
Your money is the only weapon by which they can enslave you.
If you want to keep a lion from mauling your face, you have to rip out his teeth.