So I was asked a interesting question recently and it sent me down a rabbit hole so naturally I needed to write about it here. The question was..Who do you think benefited from higher prices for food and shelter? What policies enabled this theft?
Which for this one let’s just focus on the Food part first. So with food the pandemic happened. Which meant a number of difficult things came out. We didn’t know how it was spread, where it came from, and so on for at least a few months. Restrictions had to be taken place because the number of people dying had Risen at a scary rate. Lotta questions with no answers happen and with business this was a big problem. In sum of that if you had a business let’s say you had X number of customers a day.
X=10
With the pandemic it dropped to 3 customers a day which made X =-7 a day. So clearly when we figured it all out and for the length of time it had happened our economy dropped and those business NEEDED to make up for it… Fair? maybe….maybe not… I think that’s more of an Ethical question which really is what we are doing here. If an egg company is making 15.75 billion dollars a year for the last 5 years (Roundabout number) I think a single year they could suffer a little or at least have been better prepared for said possibility. So let’s say it was poor business planning on the food industry or more so a comfortable state of mind that shouldn’t have happened. Hopefully we LEARNED!
Going back so things had to be restricted and prices had to go up to make up for the loss of a item that I think is pretty funny to have to spend 8$ on when in fact upon doing some research you really don’t need to buy anyway. For example the cost of a chicken that can lay eggs give or take is between 20$-50$ to buy from a vender. Naturally you need to now also include upkeep, feed, and of course Taxes on said animals. What parts need to be understood on cost? Land, rent or bought housing for animals. Upkeep (cleaning the animals, making them comfortable) and Feeding. Picking the eggs, selling the eggs to a distributor or doing it yourself. Now let’s just talk about the cost of chicken feed for one second. Right now you can get a bag of chicken feed for about 12$-25$ dollars depending on the size of the bag and the type of food you need. You also have to have water for the chickens to drink, and again upkeep. So really if you are willing to do the work to just start growing your own eggs it can be done for about 100$ JUST TO START with a continued cost of 25$ for food and average out about 10$ a day for water.
Most chicken produce 4-6 eggs a week. Which means after 2 weeks you will have a dozen eggs. This already is saving you money because it doesn’t really cost you anything after the start up fees to do it. You continue to have the product after that 2 weeks. If you are smart you have to storage the eggs (Also a cost) so on and so forth so really.. anyone willing to pay those prices can pretty much do it. NOT EVERYONE CAN because it does take time and work and money but it can be done.
So Circling back to the topic.. Who do you think benefited from higher prices for food and shelter? What policies enabled this theft? At the time food production was given a hand. It clearly needed the help to sort out the issues. It was going to take time, information, policies on how we produced things had to be studied, Policies on prevention of this happening again had to be put into place. Yet after 4 years here we are STILL paying after everything was solved.
WHY? Well in my opinion and I know people well enough it’s greed. Business only works …IF IT WORKS. If the companies continue to see people buying something for a insane price they will continue to hold that price until they see profits fall. It’s not hard to understand…really it’s very basic.
For example I sell my eggs that I made in my backyard for 5$ a dozen. I hear from up the block that BoB is selling his for 10$ and all he is doing is saying his taste better. IF MORE people are buying his 10$ eggs and all he is doing is saying they taste better (WHICH THEY DON’T). All I have to do is raise my price use a market policy like buy his eggs.. compare them to mine and show the people THAT MINE ARE BETTER… AND NOW we are both making 10$ eggs. IT’S LOGIC!
So again to sum it up …we do it to ourselves.