[alt text: two images stacked vertically. The first image shows a young Ryan Gosling smiling next to an advertisement photo of a Taco Bell Beefy 5-Layer Burrito, which states the burrito is 89 cents. The second image shows an adult Ryan Gosling from the movie Drive, where his character is beat up with a bandage on his nose. Next to adult Ryan Gosling is a screenshot of the Taco Bell app, showing the Beefy 5-Layer Burrito selling for $5.36.]
I fucking hate this modern way of living.
The world is going to shit, for a large part because of terrible wars. So the "economy" and "markets" get unstable and prices rise. This causes companies to hike up prices way beyond any reason, because it's an easy excuse to fill the pocket of the rich shits. All the prices going up is inflation, the price of living for the regular person going up and their money becoming less valuable. So that little bit of money a regular Joe has saved up is becoming less and less valuable by the second.
Then, and this is the real kicker, all the companies start going like "Damn the inflation is so high, we have no choice but to raise prices, sorry not sorry". No shit you dumb fucks, you are inflation, this is your doing.
And thus we are stuck in this endless loop where the rich become richer and the rest of the world just gets fucked one day at a time.
But luckily phones are cheap and we have access to the internet at all times. This way we can watch people die in the wars every day, see the rise of fascism in real time and get a second by second play of how fucked we all are.
I try to be optimistic, but the list of big issues keeps growing and instead of doing something useful about it, the world is falling apart. And this is on a macro and a micro level. The tensions and issues on a global scale are big, but people in day to day have also gotten worse in my experience.
You’re right. It’s almost like we could benefit from some sort of…consumer financial protection bureau.
Joking aside, this is a hard problem to solve with multinational corporations running the show. I certainly don’t think we sufficiently regulate corps in the states, quite the opposite really - they buy politicians in a legalized bribery scheme we call “campaign finance donations,” and are never held accountable for this type of predatory behavior.
This problem is 10x worse on an international scale, no idea how to solve for it. Maybe something like the TPP could have helped but not sure.
I think it's less that they have found an "excuse" to raise prices (companies always want more money, that's what companies do), and more that they have acquired the leverage to do so. Fast food restaurants have accumulated brand recognition and customers that are psychologically attached to their products. People are less used to cooking their own food and have less time with which they might do it. We are poorer in relative wealth terms, companies are richer and more vertically integrated, we are in a worse negotiating position.