>Britain's chicken king says the 20-year binge on cheap food is over
>Britain's 20-year binge on cheap food is coming to an end and food price inflation could hit double digits due to a tidal wave of soaring costs that are crashing through the supply chain, Britain’s biggest chicken producer said. As it emerges from the twin crises of Brexit and COVID, the world's fifth largest economy is facing an acute shortage of truckers, butchers and warehouse workers that has exacerbated global supply chain strains.
>"The days when you could feed a family of four with a 3 pound chicken are coming to an end," Ranjit Singh Boparan, owner of the 2 Sisters Group and known as the "Chicken King" said in a statement. "In relative terms, a chicken today is cheaper to buy than it was 20 years ago. How can it be right that a whole chicken costs less than a pint of beer? You’re looking at a different world from now on where the shopper pays more."
>Boparan, who produces around a third of all poultry products consumed in the United Kingdom, said he didn't think the British government could fix all the problems or control inflation. He said the constriction of labour supply would lead to wage inflation and that he would invest in automation. "Less labour means less choice, core ranges, empty shelves and wage inflation, and this isn’t going to change," he said. "Right now I need to be honest about what this means for the consumer as inflation could reach double digits.”
>Prime Minister Boris Johnson has repeatedly said that Britain's economy must kick its addiction to cheap imported labour and that it is positive that wages will have to go up. Johnson's government has denied that Brexit is responsible for the strains on the economy, though no other European economies have faced the same scale of supply chain disruption."I feel confident that there will be good provision of goods for everybody, and we are working our way to remove blockages where we can," Johnson's finance minister, Rishi Sunak, said in Washington.
>Boparan outlined a cost tsunami: feed costs, supplements, veterinary costs and wages have risen 15-20%; an acute trucker shortage; energy and carbon dioxide costs rising more than 500% from last year; and packaging up 20% in six months. 2 Sisters, founded by Boparan in 1993, sells poultry, pizza and pies. It processes 10.4 million birds a week and owns more than 700 farms. Ronald Kers, the chief executive of 2 Sisters Food Group, advised people to shop normally for Christmas and said the company would do everything it could to ensure supplies of festive turkey. Food prices rose by 0.2% in annual terms in August, according to official consumer price data, breaking a nine-month run of declines.
I'm already noticing creeping inflation everywhere. Even my barbers have increased prices which is playing havoc with my budgets, I'm having to make minor adjustments.
They keep saying it's Brexit but if that's the case why are the same supply chain issue happening all over the world? Undoubtedly Brexit has had an effect but I think there's a very dishonest framing at work here, they love the fact Brexit happened because they get to blame that for everything instead of the underlying structural issues with the global economy that have been a ticking timebomb since the 70s.
Not pork belly, don't take away my slow roasted pork belly. Slow roasting meat's both the only thing I'm good at and the only thing I can relax while doing.
Does anyone know why everything's gone bananas? I've read plenty of times that wholesale gas has gotten more expensive (I know this thread's broader than that), but no news articles seemed to bother explaining why. And I read up to five news articles a month so I'm very well informed.
>They keep saying it's Brexit but if that's the case why are the same supply chain issue happening all over the world?
The rest of the world is experiencing relatively minor supply chain issues, mainly contained to a few niche industries. That's a fairly unsurprising result of the stop-start shocks of COVID. Gas prices have spiked globally, but most other countries have stockpiled gas precisely to protect against those kinds of shocks.
Britain has been uniquely badly affected, in large part because of Brexit. We import a lot of stuff, we rely heavily on just-in-time supply chains and have relatively small stockpiles. Brexit took an economy that was entirely built around streamlined trade and added a load of logistical problems - queues at the ports because of extra paperwork, a shortage of drivers because so many of them Went Back To Where They Came From, businesses unprepared for the complexities of being a Sovereign Nation Unencumbered By Brussels Bureaucracy.
The current situation isn't the fault of Brexit, but Brexit has made a bad situation vastly worse.
Nobody fully understands why. We live in a cargo cult and the chain of dominoes falling since covid is so long and complicated that nobody truly knows the full extent.
The ismple version is something about a mix of covid after-shock and wierd economic fluctuations nobody quite predicted, the supply chain imploding thanks to both covid and a few freak events like that tanker getting stuck in Suez, there's basically a backlog on all forms of shipping and a shortage of the labour needed to catch up. Even if there were workers we're running out of automotive parts because of the chip shortage and the supply chain issues, so there are fewer vehicles in operation to work on the task. Paradoxically demand has shot up, which nobody quite knows if it's because of shorter supply or because of everyone sat at home all year or both.
Butterfly effect innit. The ripples keep on growing until they form a mighty tidal wave. If it shows one thing for sure it's that it was a bad idea to have everything under the fucking sun made in China/SE Asia.
A lot of countries have bigger stockpiles and more self sufficiency than us, so they're not seeing supermarket shelves cleared out; but then again neither are we, that's mostly confined to the southeast and the media is hyping it up to be way more of an issue than it really is.
Remember petrolpocalypse? That was a flash in the pan wasn't it.
>>35586 >>35588 What I don't look forward to reading is the shock the developing world is in for. For me the rising price of chicken may entail less going into my savings or cutting back on entertainment and clothing that I don't need. All of which can perhaps be satisfied with the acquisition of chicken. For them it's basic food and medicine.
Poor fuckers might not even be able to eat all the cheese flooding the market. Imagine that, you're in some hot Indian slum where everyone has diarrhea at the best of times, you're living in a crowded family shack and someone throws cheese into that potent mix.
>>35582 Tallow? Who the fuck uses tallow?
<rummage>
Biodiesel. Eww. That'll piss off the religious lads, they were fretting about picogrammes of the stuff in banknotes. Put a hog in your tank!
>>35587 Thanks to government debt funding furlough, we've mostly been able to carry on with life as usual during the pandemic, meanwhile China and other Asian countries have suffered strict lockdowns on and off. Sea transit times means western companies place orders many months in advance so we're feeling the impact much farther down the line and then on top of that we've had the suez blockage, Chinese ports have been locked down again due to recent covid outbreaks adding even more strain to the system as freighters have queued up outside ports for weeks. On top of that over the past year a lot of big American companies like wallmart and home depot went mental and placed massive orders predicted a surge in demand, because of that a lot of ships bound for Europe have simply been cancelled so the freight companies can take advantage of the much higher prices they've been able to charge for taking the glut of containers to the USA.
Regarding the chip shortage there are rumours that Apple has taken advantage of its obscene offshore cash reserves to stockpile chips which is contributing a lot to the shortage.
Some time over the course of the next 6 to 12 months everything is going to start to catch up, and it'll be a completely different sort of chaos as there's going to be more goods turning up than there's warehouse space available to take it all.
>>35598 Iron ore prices doubled over summer as China massively ramped up demand as economies came out of lockdown, but recently they've crashed back to normal prices.
But steel prices will stay high for the immediate future as the steel industry is energy intensive and uses a lot of gas.
Stainless steels, copper, and other special alloys are extremely expensive right now, but this is mainly due to the much higher prices of nickel and copper thanks to demand for batteries and electric motors. This isn't going to go away any time soon.
>>35625 better than goose fat? But fair enough - for some reason, I don't associate tallow with food-safe. The tallow marketing board need to get their shit together.
>>35633 "normal" is the wrong word.
What >>35627 means is the spending power of the public was mostly uninterrupted, the vast majority of the public was either still working or on furlough on slightly reduced pay. You couldnt go out and spend on the high street or go out for a meal but spending moved to other types of product and goods like electronics for working or play at home, gardening equipment, home gyms etc were in huge demand. Yes we stopped making cars, but all the people who worked in the car industry were still getting paid and spending that money.
The contrast to Asia is that manufacturing industries in certain countries have often shut down completely at a time when demand is increasing.
>Biscuit maker McVitie's says the prices of many of its best-selling brands are set to soar. The firm, which is owned by Pladis Global, said brands such as Jaffa Cakes, Penguins and Hobnobs could go up in price by as much as 5%. It blamed staff absences, more expensive ingredients and higher labour costs which it says it has to pass on to consumers. However, it said its "humble chocolate digestive" would be less affected.
>Pladis's UK managing director, David Murray, said: "Omicron disruption, absenteeism, and the rising cost of business going forward present a big challenge for us. "At the end of the day, like in many other categories, it will flow through to higher prices." Pladis, which also manufactures Jacob's crackers and Go Ahead fruit bars, said it had seen double digit-percentage cost rises on ingredients such as cocoa beans recently.
>Higher wheat prices have also hit the business. "We've dealt with substantial challenges in the past in the food industry - whether it's natural disasters, inflation in the economic crisis," Mr Murray said. "It's the compression of the challenge, combined with the scale of some of them [that is different this time]," he added.
>Shortages of many goods, including building materials and computer chips, are causing supply problems and pushing up prices across industries. The cost of living surged by 5.1% in the 12 months to November, up from 4.2% the month before, and its highest level since September 2011.
>Workers should not ask for big pay rises, to try and stop prices rising out of control, the Bank of England governor has told the BBC.
>Prices are expected to climb faster than pay, putting the biggest squeeze on household finances in decades. Andrew Bailey said the Bank raised rates to 0.5% from 0.25% to prevent rising prices becoming "ingrained". Asked if the Bank was also implicitly asking workers not to demand big pay rises, he said: "Broadly, yes".
>Inflation is on course to rise above 7% this year, leaving households facing the biggest income squeeze in decades. Post-tax incomes are forecast to fall 2% this year, after taking into account the rising cost of living. This represents the biggest fall in living standards since records began in 1990.
You' know, they enacted a similar policy after the black death when inflation rocketed. By statute setting the price of basic goods and labour, even forcing idle people under the age of 60 to work to maintain the labour pool, so as to revert the system back to the good old days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordinance_of_Labourers_1349
>>36823 I can't help but find this galling. Pay restraint was all well and good in the 1970s when it was coming off the back of a decade or more of real-terms pay increases but asking people to not to ask for a raise after more than a decade of wage stagnation takes some fucking cheek. I know the problems with introducing price controls (yay, shortages!) or bigger interest rate hikes (yay, 10% unemployment!), but if it seemed like profiteers and speculators were also going to get it in the teeth it wouldn't be half as bad.
Is there a single worker in the country - even one - that is no longer going to ask for a pay rise because of what the dude who used to sign banknotes says?
>>36825 You're right, but what the banks statement does is give all the bosses in the country the right to say no, because the Bank says its a bad idea.
Of course, while Shell PLC have seen their profits increase fourteen-fold due to the squeeze on gas, when you hear them (and assorted finance industry sycophants) talk about it, you'd think prices just went up all on their own and there's nothing they can possibly do about it. They all just got to work one morning and found out they were making an excess 13 billion, and thought "Oh no, this is terrible. I wish we had some kind of power to stop making all this money, but we don't."
I don't think there were very many workers getting them in the first place, whether they asked or not, which is kind of the problem. And beyond that, it's pretty amusing how these people live in a world where people get to just ask for a pay rise- I don't think that's the case for the majority of the country's workers.
Imagine the lad pushing the trollies in at Tesco goes to his boss "Can I have a payrise, boss? I have worked here four years and I've never pulled a sickie, I'm a hard worker and my gas bill has gone up loads, so it'd really help." What do you think the response would be? The truth is you only get the luxury of salary negotiation when you're already well above the level of the average British employee.
I mean. We live in an era where a Conservative government had to give out a bigger increase in the minimum wage than Labour ever have, because businesses have simply stopped pulling their weight.
>>36829 > The truth is you only get the luxury of salary negotiation when you're already well above the level of the average British employee.
For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.
>>36836 My favourite is the Vivera shawarma. Beyond Meat do the best burgers but they're pricey; the Linda McCartney mozzarella burgers aren't bad so I usually pick them up when they're offer for a quid and I don't mind The Vegetarian Butcher ones either. Favourite sausages are probably the Cauldron Lincolnshire ones but they're not much nicer than, say, Morrisons Lincolnshire sausages.
Vegetarian mince is almost exclusively shite. I tend to use dehydrated soya mince, but Linda McCartney's is probably the best out of a bad bunch for fresh/frozen mince. I use Quorn pieces sometimes in curry, but most of their range is bollocks. Avoid Birds Eye like the plague.
>>37014 I regularly browse through the Google recommend articles thingy on my phone, and for a couple of days almost every single guardian article was adding that photo too. Wonder if it was an evident or of they were doing the private eye trick
>Cadbury has shrunk the size of its Dairy Milk sharing bars by 10%, but will not reduce the price for customers.
>Parent company Mondelez blamed costs associated with the production of its chocolate spiking, as it reduced the bars' size from 200g to 180g. They are still typically being sold at £2 despite the downsize. US firm Mondelez said the move was the first for that size of Dairy Milk bar in a decade.
>In 2020, the company was accused of "shrinkflation" - reducing the size of a product while keeping the price the same to boost profits. At the time, Cadbury chocolate bars sold in multipacks, including popular treats like Crunchies, Twirls and Wispas, were reduced in size to reduce their calorie count, Mondelez said.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60902583
Less chocolate, more waistline, softer erections, is there anything to look forward to in the future?
>>38056 They would have done this anyway, because they are thieving rats and vermin. If they're only committing the same treachery they did last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, then maybe all the panic stations this year are overblown. Because I didn't watch the news much, but I'm sure 2020 and 2021 were fine and nothing really went wrong then.
We’re swapping a £40k nanny for a £10k au pair: preparing for the cost of living squeeze
Like many mothers Jessica Keplinger, 38, is having to make changes because of the rising cost of living, changing her childcare arrangements, her car and her shopping habits.
Keplinger, from Kingston upon Thames, in southwest London, is thinking of getting an au pair to help look after her three-year-old son, Teddy, which will cost about £10,000 a year, rather than a full-time nanny, which is more like £40,000. She and her husband, a hedge fund manager, are also planning to give up their Audi A3, which is mainly only used for the school run, and considering hiring a Tesla, which will cut costs and help the environment.
Other changes include ditching her £18 veg boxes and using Ocado and her local farmers’ market instead, ironing her own clothes and stopping regular takeaways from Hakkasan, the upmarket Cantonese restaurant. The Keplingers moved home last summer to be nearer the German School, where Teddy is a pupil. It costs about £4,300 a term. Keplinger, an interior designer who is retraining to be a health coach, would like another child but is wondering if it is affordable.
>>38384 >Saturday January 15 2022
To think the cost of living crisis is biting so tightly we can't afford new stories to be outraged about. The struggle is real, lads.
>>38384 I'm amazed by the continued existence of au pairs. Even with living expenses covered that's 10k a year in London. And I imagine it's a lonely subservient existence too for what are young women chosen by their "family".
Don't they live in with the family? So they get housed and fed for nowt essentially. £10k wage without having any expenses means they're probably still better off than me earning two and a half times that.
