Key Points
- As shoppers await price cuts, retailers like Home Depot say their prices have stabilized and some national consumer brands have paused price increases or announced more modest ones.
- Yet some industry watchers predict deflation for food at home later this year.
- Falling prices could bring new challenges for retailers, such as pressure to drive more volume or look for ways to cover fixed costs, such as higher employee wages.
A big part of that was greed, but not due to rising wages as the poster suggests. Real wages (which means inflation adjusted) did rise sharply in the immediate time after the pandemic recession, but stabilized by 2022.
There were legitimate bottleneck issues that caused some prices to rise. Companies then saw that they had a once in a century opportunity to raise them even more and blame bottlenecks. Despite what a lot of people think, companies can’t raise prices arbitrarily in most circumstances. They’ll just lose customers. This particular situation, though, meant that everyone could do it at once and customers would just have to bear it.