Respectfully, this doesn't have much relevance to the fact that basic necessities like rent and food are significantly more expensive than they were just two years ago.
Housing, transportation, and food account for over 60% of all spending.
Experienes and goods aren't my problem. My problem is that my dwelling costs $500 a month more than it did in 2021 and I live in the exact same place, and I haven't gotten a raise.
Housing is an auction, and a bet on how well the area is going to do. If you live in a place that has very high demand, prices are going to go up if there's no building being done. But it's not all rising prices: My house's value hasn't outpaced inflation through the last 20 years, because it's in the wrong part of St Louis. People with blue collar occupations have no problem buying around me: You can buy a 4 bedroom house for under 300k, and their salaries have gone up far more than the price of the houses.
So house pricing problems? Just localized regulatory problems. We'd have a much smaller problem if more metro areas were attractive to people, instead of having such a big separation between of winners and losers.
Plus, mortgage rates are set at a national level. Your house price went up dramatically in the last two years even though the purchase price didn’t increase because someone new to the neighborhood has to pay a higher monthly payment to buy.
I would argue that the amount of homes that lost value enough to fully compensate the rapid increase in interest rates is going to be extremely low, even in towns and neighborhoods facing rapid decline.
Who do you think are the winners, and who do you think are losers.
You can buy in the wrong part of a city but you will pay much less. Who wins, people who pay less or people who pay less? I think it depends on what they are after.
Between the recent (nationwide) realtor fee debacle and RealPage et al.'s (multi-state) price-fixing, it's probably more accurate to say that housing is a (national) grift.
> basic necessities like [...] food are significantly more expensive than they were just two years ago.
Here on the farm, the price I'm getting when selling food is half of it was two years ago. If I, the farmer, am selling the food for less than two years ago, while you are paying more than two years ago, then it seems experiences are you problem – e.g. you are paying more for the experience of shopping in a grocery store.
If your time is worthless, the least expensive option will be to produce your own food.
If your time has value, the least expensive option will be to buy from a commercial kitchen.
What is reasonable is subjective and depends on the experience you want to have.
If you enjoy cooking as a hobby and are able to afford the high cost of operating your own kitchen, then that will be the only reasonable choice in your mind, and in that case the grocery store will provide a pretty nice experience in simulating wholesale distribution in quantities the hobbyist can manage.
A number of reports suggest that commercial kitchen use is on the decline, so, assuming people aren't eating less, it seems that cooking is gaining in interest as a hobby. Thus it stands to reason that the grocery store can charge that elevated interest more than in times past. That's just basic supply and demand.
You're presumably in America, where they essentially have two kinds of produce: cheap and expensive. Not too much of a middle ground there.
If you produce the former, the shop will purchase large amounts and distribute them to a large audience. You couldn't possibly sell that quantity yourself. The value added is obvious, and their margin is relatively low anyway.
If you produce the latter, the shop will be taking higher margins, but they're much more involved in marketing your product, since they're taking a risk by associating it with their upper-class lifestyle brand. Again clear value added.
Best price for the farmer is always to sell it themselves, but you can only sell a limited amount that way. In Netherland, some smaller farms have a little stall outside where they sell their produce. It's very cheap and fresh for the customer, and the farmer gets a much better price. But the total amount they're selling that way is never going to be big. I suspect it's just a nice bonus to them.
My brother in law has cows, and he recently switched to producing organic milk. That gets him a much better price, and he also recently started making his own cheese and grow his own grain. I love the diversification and we buy directly from him, but his reach is more limited than when he just has Campina pick up all his milk (which still happens).
> they essentially have two kinds of produce: cheap and expensive. Not too much of a middle ground there.
In fact, there is middle ground as the least expensive product goes for animal feed. The middle ground is the lesser quality, but still high enough quality, product that human consumers are still willing to purchase.
You, of course, set out to grow the highest quality product you can – it fetches the highest value, after all – but Mother Nature often has other plans.
The pockets of the entire economy. Ultimately, food is mostly sold on futures contracts, so realistically the end consumer is currently paying the price from one to two years ago when the farm gate price was double what it is now. Within the next year or so, retail food will no doubt crash hard as those old contracts start to clear and the much lower contracts of today start to come into force.
Hardly. If you do not pay your taxes, other people will seek restitution. If you do not engage in the experience provided by the food middlemen, nobody is going to care.
One can always by directly from the farmer, or produce their own food, if they truly do not want the experiences provided by the third parties. But I expect most people will find out that the experiences are actually pretty great.
Not to put any blame on you or anything, because rents are crazy, but median wages have risen pretty significantly over the last few years. You definitely should be looking for a raise, or a new place of work.
On a personal level I feel the same strains, but all sources I’m finding have median wages rising more than median rent since 2020 and certainly since 2021.
However, that would not be true for buying a home especially when factoring in borrowing costs.
That's because rents temporarily cratered when people couldn't move due to lockdowns. But that was monthly, during the latter half of 2020 and the early half of 2021. Moving season is early summer, so people were locked into leases until prices rose again. Then, those leases were hiked in a massive price-fixing scheme, I mean raised in observance of inflation.
Housing, transportation, and food account for over 60% of all spending.
Experienes and goods aren't my problem. My problem is that my dwelling costs $500 a month more than it did in 2021 and I live in the exact same place, and I haven't gotten a raise.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cesan.pdf