Yesterday, every company I ever bought something from solicited my business.
Today, every other company I've interacted with is asking for donations.
In other news, groceries are now costing us 2x what they were 12 months ago, and our health insurance premiums are going up 30% for the 2nd year, and we're figuring out what to cut out of our budget to pay for the increased corporate profits.
Guess this is what late-stage trickle-down capitalism looks like.
@wyrmeboi Government indexes aside, our buying and products haven’t changed. We’re retired, and I track all expenses over time. Groceries in particular are way up. We shop mostly from the parameter, few packaged/processed foods. We also live in a rural town in CA, with limited choices. Even the eggs we buy from homegrown neighbors went from $4/dozen to $6-7, since their feed cost has gone up so much.
Heck, firewood went from around $400 last fall to $500 a cord this year.
@wyrmeboi And, of course, every video streaming service, our local ISP, Starlink, Amazon, and mobile phones, each up 5-20%. Auto insurance, up 10%. So when I hear inflation is at 3-4%, I have a hard time finding anything we spend money on that’s only gone up by that amount.
Not even touching on “shrinkflation”, where many products we buy have shrunk in size/quantity recently. Like toilet paper and paper towels.
@kay_dub That is the western US consumer price index from the US dept of labor statistics. And lest you think I am cherry picking, I just couldn't source a graph on this time scale for the whole country. But I'm pretty sure it would look like this regardless.