Austin Frerick was right. The food suppliers in this country are gouging. They know it and we know it. Everyone is talking about it, but no one seems to know what to do, who to turn to, who to blame. There was an article written almost a year ago where I first saw that phrase: Greedflation. It feels about as good to say as “Shrinkflation” or “WalletGate,” because they all mean the same thing.
Someone is robbing us in broad daylight and there’s nothing we can do about it. The cops won’t be answering this call. No one is coming to save the American consumer. Pure baloney.
What we do here at SF is shed a light, illuminate the issues surrounding price increases and expose the liars and the bad actors.
Food prices ballooned by 25 and 30 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and have jumped at least another 20 percent since, according to numbers from the BLS.
We’ve proven it’s not fuel prices behind the nearly 60% rise in groceries pre- and post-Covid.
It’s not enough to make phone calls or send emails to corporations and their willing minions, because they won’t return the call. What are they going to say? “Oh, yeah, we’re gouging the hell out of poor Americans because we’ve been doing it for years, because we can!”
So, we’re starting a new target campaign. The goal? To get the feds to charge these cartels appropriately and change their pricing patterns. Whether it’s the FTC, Congress or the governors of every single state in the Union, we’re going to get a response.
Two weeks ago, we gave you a blank template containing a letter to Congress and the exact link to the FTC so you could send your Congress and Senate members a very articulated reason to start fighting for lower grocery prices. Did you send it to your Congressperson or Senator? If you did nothing but scroll the past week, you can stop bitching about high food prices. This is engaged consumerism here. There is power in the numbers, and we easily outnumber the cartels. Memo to the cartels: we’re not screwing around anymore. If we have to press, bother, annoy, cajole, irritate, or anger someone sufficiently to finally lower the boom on your grocery prices? Tough. Deal with it.
Or…if we offend some supplier sensibilities along the way? Hey, that’s just one of the perks.
– Jack Delaney
Sources: USDA, Civil Eats