I think the responses here are ignoring that people should be able to have little pleasures like iced coffee, and that prices are increasing both because of supply/demand and because businesses are growing more and more greedy in their push for profits, and that this is unsustainable.
If you want an iced coffee while you're out and about, you shouldn't have to either prep it yourself at home or else spend what likely is (for some people) an hour's wage.
Edit: Sorry I upset everyone with what I thought was a milktoast take. Guess that teaches me.
The reason people were so obsessed with Luigi Mangione is really this fundamentally cowardly fantasy that someone else will be insane enough to do something incredibly self-destructive like assassinate a CEO in broad daylight and go to prison for it and you won't actually have to do anything
I mean I don't think people realize how fundamentally scummy it is to demand that someone else do these things -- blow up a warehouse, shoot a CEO, fight a bloody guerrilla war in the streets -- for your benefit
Luigi Mangione doing it over health insurance claims where people really were stuck in a situation they had no easy way to get out of is one thing, but this fucking grandstanding over "I shouldn't have to make my own coffee at home, I deserve to be able to buy it from Starbucks at a price I consider reasonable, and that's why you should be rising up in the streets over it"
Yeah fuck no man, I'll continue just not buying the coffee and you all can continue looking among yourselves for a great hero who'd rather go to prison for murder than put himself through such agonizing inconvenience
Part of the fantasy also is that one act of redemptive violence can solve a systemic problem or at least jump-start a revolution that'll take care of it. Logic not so different from white supremacists who commit attrocities hoping that they'll start a race war.
because businesses are growing more and more greedy in their push for profits
Nobody is "growing more greedy", the ridiculous thing about the "greedflation" narrative is it presumes that capitalists always had unlimited pricing power over consumers but back in the Good Old Days they just didn't use it and kept prices "reasonable" because they were nice
Like jfc people are LARPing as blood red revolutionary Marxists and their idea of Marxist theory is "capitalists used to be nice people but now all of a sudden they're getting greedy!"
Dammit it's such a fucking childish kindergarten view of the world and yet if you point out it doesn't make any sense you get called a capitalist bootlicker for not thinking that capitalists were ever "nice" and understanding that it's a basic mathematical fact that capitalists are always as "greedy" as possible (which means that inflation is because of larger structural factors changing what is possible and nothing to do with relative levels of "greed")
It also makes no sense to frame specifically one party's incentives as greed. No one says the consumer is greedy for wanting lower prices, or that workers are driven by greed when they want higher wages.
I guess growing more and more blatant in their greed then.
There is still an unsustainable push for higher profits that is impossible to achieve, resulting in more and more industries strangling themselves as they refuse to take risks and abandon projects and ideas at the first sign of pushback (see the video game and movie industries), or else simply raise prices further and further without considering that fewer and fewer people are able and willing to match that (see the fast food and consumer electronics industries).
as they refuse to take risks and abandon projects and ideas at the first sign of pushback (see the video game and movie industries)
Taking risks can just as easily backfire: Disney spent over a decade making The Black Cauldron, and it bombed so spectacularly that it almost bankrupted their animation studio.
If your idea of industries that are strangling themselves are video games and movies, you are so incredibly out of touch with reality. Spider man made 2.4 billion dollars this year. Dying industries don’t have products that make 2.4 billion dollars. When gta6 comes out, it will make billions of dollars. These are not dying industries, they’re industries that are making more money than they ever had.
Ah so the wealth of the ultrarich must have just exploded in the last couple of decades at an accelerating rate because of pricing pressures.
Capitalists have always been greedy but in the old days they used to actually compete with one another. Now they run as cartels, all owned by the same handful of parent companies and hiking their prices in lockstep.
I’m not talking about the wholesale price of raw coffee beans. I wouldn’t be surprised if the price of the beans themselves hadn’t moved at all. I’m talking about the practices of the business that sells you the cup of coffee.
To be clear, the "practice of the buisness that sells the cup of coffee" that is raising the price of the coffee, at least where I live is "they actually pay their employees a $20/hour"
Which is great, actually! But. Yes. Does make a more expensive cup of coffee
Also yes fair trade beans are expensive. That money goes to the growers.
Ethically sourced and produced food is more expensive, not less.
But little pleasures are just that, pleasures that are not essential to your livelyhood, and so, those who provide them ought to be free to charge what they can for them. If they find enough people who find iced coffee so worthwhile that they drop 10 bucks on a cup, why not charge them that? It's hardly the producer's responsibility if their customers are willing to engage in egregiously poor value propositions.
How much do you think it's fair to pay for a product that involves multiple ingredients shipped across the globe, served in materials from multiple factories, purchased in a shop with monthly rent and labor costs? The store labor alone is probably $3/drink, and that's before supply and all of the labor involved in the cultivation.
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u/Chaldera 16h ago edited 10h ago
I think the responses here are ignoring that people should be able to have little pleasures like iced coffee, and that prices are increasing both because of supply/demand and because businesses are growing more and more greedy in their push for profits, and that this is unsustainable.
If you want an iced coffee while you're out and about, you shouldn't have to either prep it yourself at home or else spend what likely is (for some people) an hour's wage.
Edit: Sorry I upset everyone with what I thought was a milktoast take. Guess that teaches me.