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.

>>35583

>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.

>>35585

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.

>>35586

>The rest of the world is experiencing relatively minor supply chain issues

Are they? From what I can tell it seems like they're suffering largely to the same extent as us.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cargo-delays-are-getting-worse-but-california-ports-still-rest-on-weekends-11632648602

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
What the hell is happening with steel? I distinctly remember China flooding the market or something at some point.

>>35598

The construction and automotive industries are back to full production after the pandemic, fuel prices are sky-high and there's a shortage of scrap.

>>35598
Either it's because of this
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58879481
or it's going to make it even worse shortly.

>>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!

>>35621
I occasionally buy tallow. Nowt wrong with it.

>>35622
what do you use it for?

>>35623

Cooking I assume.

>>35623
Frying.

>>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.

>>35627
>we've mostly been able to carry on with life as usual during the pandemic

Excuse me?

>>35630

Not him, but he's right, especially when compared to the countries he's talking about, which was definitely the point.

Unless the rozzers welded the door to your house shut, too.

>>35631
It was illegal to leave except for a fixed set of reasons, welding or no.

What planet are you on where that doesn't constitute 'carry on with life as usual'??

Fucking frightening how authoritarian people can be.

>>35633
-doesn't

>>35633

I couldn't be anything further from authoritarian, you fucking mug.

Read the lads post again for fucks sake, I'm not getting into a semantic cuntoff on a friday.

>>35633

Depends how often you leave the house really.

>>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.

Things are catching up in the States now.

https://www.newsweek.com/dunkin-store-out-donuts-food-shortages-supply-chain-turkeys-covid-19-impact-1639388

>>35647
Oh god, this is had, America runs on Dunkin'

Sarah Millican's Squelchy Fanny Custard is now £6 more expensive ITZ!!
https://uk.Sarah Millican's Squelchy Fanny Custard.com/pages/price-change-dec-2021

To top it off the bakery goods at my local Sainsburys have increased in price by 10p from £1.20. They're targeting us.

>>35839

>Sarah Millican's Squelchy Fanny Custard

I can't remember what this is a wordfilter for, but it makes me slightly horny every time I see it.

>>35841
The popular meal replacement shake that is nutritionally complete.

>>35841

>but it makes me slightly horny every time I see it

Right you are.

>>35844
Why do they wear those glasses, lads. It's like the fashion accessory version of doing that 'hilarious' smeagol voice.

>>35851
They wear them to make me hard.

>>35851

Big glasses make your face look smaller by comparison. Bloaty face or moonface = wear big bold glasses to separate your features a bit.

>Hobnobs maker warns biscuit prices set to soar

>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.

>Food and drink firms recently warned that they had seen "terrifying" price rises which would have a knock-on effect on consumers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59728325

Check the padlock on your shed, the neighbours will soon be coming over.

>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.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60206564

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.

>>36823
>>36824

Cheek doesn't begin to describe it.

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."

>>36825

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.

>>36830
Why are you repeating what he said, in a poncey voice?

Hogs up 135%, this place must be well pissed off.

>>36833
No mate, there's only three of us, and two are vegan.

>>36834
I'm not actually vegan or vegetarian; I just rate a lot of disappointing meat substitutes.

>>36835
Best one so far? Nearly all of them I've tried are shit.

>>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.

>>36837
Quorn pieces are great in a stir fry.

>>37014
If he didn't do it, but had the chance to, he must be fuming now.

>>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

>>37017
*Accident not evident

>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.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/were-swapping-a-40k-nanny-for-a-10k-au-pair-preparing-for-the-cost-of-living-squeeze-cgpb3ssbl

>>38384

Amazing weather we're having for this time of year.

>>38384

This is so ridiculous I can't even be angry. I feel absolutely nothing about it.

Is it satire?

>>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.

> I'm already noticing creeping inflation everywhere.
I paid £6.95 for a pint yesterday. it was a fancy craft IPA, but even so.

>>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".

>>38389
> subservient
Au pair literally means something like at par, as in they are an equal member of the family, not a servant.

Also, 10k , no tax, = 833 a month to spend? That seems perfectly livable-off.

>>38389

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.

>Household energy bills in Britain look set to surge by another 40% in October, the industry regulator warned on Tuesday, deepening a cost-of-living crisis that is piling pressure on the government to do more to help the poorest.

>Ofgem said its price cap on the most-widely used tariffs could reach 2,800 pounds when it is next reviewed in October. That would be up 42% from the current 1,971 pound cap announced in April, which was itself a more than 50% rise on the previous level. "The price changes in the gas market are genuinely a once in a generation event - not seen since the oil crisis in the 1970s," Brearley said.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britons-warned-energy-bills-could-jump-another-40-october-2022-05-24/

Are you lot ready to get poorer?

>>38483
Come on, lads. Those lampposts aren't going to decorate themselves, you know.

>>38483

I don't get it. These companies are all making record profits. Shell, BP, British Gas, N Power, Texas Pete, The Coal Burners, the lot of them. They are all posting billions in profits. So why does the price have to go up, and why is everyone acting like we're powerless to stop it?

I'm not making a rhetorical point here, I mean it. Even from a full retard Ayn Rand libertarian perspective it doesn't make sense. They're free marketing all wrong.

>>38485

Demand for oil and gas is currently outstripping supply. There's no single reason for this - partly a post-COVID rebound in demand, partly a reduction in supply due to the Russia-Ukraine situation, partly logistics issues, partly opportunism.

In a normal market, you'd expect people to invest money to increase supply, which would be profitable for them and push down prices. That isn't happening for a number of reasons. Ramping up the supply of anything takes time; that issue is particularly acute for oil and gas, because drilling new boreholes and building new refineries. We've already drilled for all of the easily accessible oil and gas, so the incremental cost of each unit of production is greater than the last. We're talking about hugely expensive infrastructure that takes decades to pay off, which brings us to the overarching problem - we're desperate for oil now.

The market for fossil fuels is very close to a historical peak. World governments are seriously committed to decarbonisation in a way that hasn't been seen before. Rapid improvements in solar panels, electric vehicles and heat pumps are rapidly making fossil fuels obsolete. Oil companies and their shareholders are extremely pessimistic about their long-term prospects. Their cost to get oil out of the ground keeps going up, while the cost of alternative energy sources keeps going down. The shareholders are choosing to take profits out of the company now in the form of dividends, rather than gambling on a very uncertain future by re-investing those profits in capital that might never earn a return.

This price spike is essentially the death throes of the fossil fuel industry. They're going to try and rinse every last bit of money out of the business while they still can. They can get away with it for now, but it's very much a one-time windfall due to an odd confluence of factors. The obvious solution is a windfall tax - obvious to everyone apart from our Prime Minister, that is.

>>38486

Their future plans don't really seem to align with that entirely.

>>38487

My chemistry teacher in year 10 once said that we'll probably only stop using fossil fuels entirely when we've completely run out of them, because save for unforeseeable advances in personal-use hydrogen fusion technology, the energy density of oil and petrol and their abundant commercial availability are just too attractive to switch to electricity entirely as long as we don't absolutely have to.

Granted, that was some 30 years ago, and even as a PhD, he couldn't quite foresee the evolution of EVs up to the present, but energy density is still the one advantage oil has over lithium batteries, and the infrastructure to deliver oil and petrol to industrial and end consumers is still far more developed and cost efficient than using electricity as fuel.

You'll probably have to ban mass consumption of petrol outright at some point to really get people to switch. Or make it so prohibitively expensive that nobody can realistically afford to run a petrol car as a daily driver.

>>38487

Oil and gas capital expenditure peaked in 2015. Capex needs to increase just for the industry to stand still, because each new well is more difficult and more expensive than the last.

Oil companies obviously aren't going to come out and say that the party is over, but they aren't spending with any confidence. COVID was a massively disruptive shock, but the overall trend was clear before the pandemic.

https://ieefa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Oil-Majors-Shrinking-Capex-Signals-Industry-in-Decline_February-2020.pdf

I was in half a mind about the Byline Times article about the expected civil unrest but here's another from a bigger news source.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/police-forces-prepare-for-civil-unrest-this-summer-over-cost-of-living-crisis/ar-AAXEx75

>>38490
I am very dismissive of the cost-of-living crisis. The Martin Lewis Money Show was just on ITV, and they had a big thing about how not to be scammed by banks when you go on your foreign holiday this year. That's not exactly for people who are starving. And all the horror stories, and even the phrase "heating or eating", sound very familiar, having been recycled from last time people were on the bones of their booties. I'm sure the stories are true, but I think there is a cohort of society that is always choosing between heating and eating, and the media just visits them every few years to report on them again as if they're a new problem. I make below the national median wage and I'm doing just fine (although I have no dependents; I work with a guy whose wife has stopped working to raise their new kid so it's just his salary, which is similar to mine, and he says he is flat broke. He might have to sell the flat he rents out as an investment). It's also worth bearing in mind that we have a number of government "crises" happening simultaneously - cost of living, housing, climate, productivity - but the only one being focused on by the government is the one that affects the pensioners who elected them. It all feels much less apocalyptic than people are saying.

>>38491
Hold on. Scratch that. It's all going Mad Max. My loaf of bread has one less slice than it used to. I used to get 18 slices to a loaf, but as I toast slices 13, 14 and 15 for tea (one reason why I'm so fearless is because I am a fantastically tight bastard), I see that I have the crusts left and no other slice. This loaf is only 17 slices. They're coming after my frugal lifestyle now.

Interestingly, the loaf is still 800g. Arguments about the cost of flour and wheat do not apply. This is shrinkflation for profit only; they are selling me exactly the same amount of bread, but slicing it thicker so I have to buy more to get the same number of slices. It costs them the same to make. I've been passively angry ever since this bread stopped having 20 slices per 800g loaf. But now they're really fucking robbing me. It's time for hangings. It's time for lynchings. Fuck these thieving bastards. I withdraw everything I just said. The revolution cannot come soon enough.

>>38491
I'm not sure if the increase in food bank use really fits with that narrative.

>>38492

None of what you just said has anything to do with the actual problems.

>The Chicken King

>>38485
>>38486
I don't see how a windfall tax would address the deep cutting supply chain issues across the whole economy. Or that supply has recovered sufficiently from lockdown lows to make sense that there is a conspiracy at work and not instead a logistical delay exacerbated by geopolitical issues and the nature of selling to the highest bidder in a global marketplace.

It also doesn't quite explain the fertiliser and import challenges snarling the food sector. Nor does it explain how the UK government will artificially control price on a globally traded commodity. Or the inflationary pressures driven by QE and labour will decrease. In fact it doesn't say all that much at all about it, does it, greenie-beanie.

>>38491

On one level I could echo your sentiments; but on another level, even though I'm doing "just fine" in relative terms to the people who are really struggling, it's hard not to be pissed off with all of this.

In absolute terms I'm earning double what I made when I was a youth starting out my first job. I've got my own home and I have a decent amount of disposable income to save up and buy expensive fancy toys, or go on holiday if I wanted to, or whatever. But if things keep up the way they are going, that won't be the case any more, and eventually I'll end up back to square one, indeed, quite possibly worse off because as least when I was 18, I was living at home and didn't have the bills to pay.

That's the part that's anxiety inducing and scary about it. I've worked my arse off the last ten years to better myself and get into a decent job with a job somewhere remotely near the median income, and it's only over the last couple of years I've actually seen my income enter the realms of "comfortable". But I'm staring at a future where all that hard work just gets wiped away by forces outside of my control.

And of course the thing is that for the people who have been stuck on the bottom rung all along, for whom things were already shite in 2008, it's only got continually worse year on year; and before long it'll be positively Dickensian. There's only so long you can handwave it away and say that it's fine, even if people are poor in Britain they're still okay in global terms, but that's just increasingly less true. There's going to be families out there subject to frankly third world conditions, the only difference is we have giant financial institutions who are happy to keep fancy gadgets in their hands for £30 a month through it all and then the upper class can just go "Well look, they have smart phones, obviously they're not that poor!"

>>38491

People don't think in absolute terms, they think in relative terms. The average household is going to be at least £2,000 a year worse off, probably more. That's a total disaster if you're genuinely living hand-to-mouth, but it's still pretty unpleasant if you're basically doing OK. Think about how delighted most people would be if they won two grand on a scratchcard - it's not a life-changing sum of money, but it might pay off your credit card debt or buy a couple of holidays or a bumper Christmas for the kids. We've all won an anti-scratchcard for minus £2,000 and it's a kick in the bollocks.

I can't say I've noticed the impact and I'm sure there are others in the same boat, but at an earlier point in my life I would have been absolutely doing my nut about it; not because I would have been made destitute, but because I'd have been forced to give up a lot of ordinary comforts. £40 a week would have been the difference between feeling financially comfortable and constantly worrying about making it to payday. There's a vast psychological difference between having a little bit of spare cash and not quite having enough.

The government are going to have to reckon with the fact that most people's lives are getting noticeably worse because of the cost of living. Most people are going to experience the stress of having to cut back, having to pinch pennies, having to choose what to give up.

>>38496

What the fuck are you on about mate? Of course a windfall tax on oil and gas companies won't fix a bunch of unrelated issues, but it could fund a sufficient subsidy to ensure that people don't freeze to death this winter.

>The end of fish and chips? Rising prices threaten a British tradition

>Fish and chips in hand, Prime Minister Boris Johnson once promised to "build back batter" from the pandemic. Now though, rising prices are veering Britain's economy further off course. A third of fish and chip shops are at risk of going bust this year due to a "perfect storm" of price pressures, according to insolvency firm Company Debt. In just a year, prices for Britain's favourite fish - cod and haddock - are up 75%, sunflower oil is up 60%, and flour is up 40%, Company Debt said. Inflation reached a 40-year peak of 9% in April, the highest in the G7, and is projected to rise further. British consumers are more pessimistic than peers in Europe, leading to criticism of both government and Bank of England efforts to keep a lid on the cost of living. Cod and chips in Singh's shop now costs 9.50 pounds, compared to 7.95 pounds a year ago. And Singh said if he passed on all the higher costs, the price would be closer to 11 pounds.

>Battered fish and fried chips, have fuelled Britons since the combination was invented 160 years ago. The meal is such a staple that unlike other food in Britain, it was not rationed during the world wars. Chippies, with their distinctive smell of oil and vinegar, remain a presence in most towns. Some of the recent difficulties for fish and chip shops began after Brexit, distant-waters trawler company UK Fisheries said, estimating that the amount of Arctic cod Britain is allowed to catch in 2022 reduced to around 40% of what it was before leaving the European Union. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has driven up fuel and electricity prices, further increasing the cost of catching, and frying, fish. The war has sent cooking oil, fertiliser and flour prices higher too.

>Cod and haddock are sourced in the Barents Sea, north of Norway and Russia, and the war has heightened uncertainty over those supplies. In March, the British government listed Russian white fish as among goods to be hit with a 35% tariff as part of sanctions in response to the invasion of Ukraine. It has paused the move, for now, while the impact is investigated. Sunflower oil is the principle agricultural commodity the UK imports from Ukraine and the government says it is working to substitute it with other vegetable oils: for instance, receiving extra rapeseed shipments from Australia after a strong harvest there.

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/end-fish-chips-rising-prices-threaten-british-tradition-2022-05-26/

It's strange that for an island nation I don't think we really eat fish anymore. All you'd really need to do is take tuna away and we'd be living off sushi and squid rings.

>>38515

>Cod and chips in Singh's shop now costs 9.50 pounds, compared to 7.95 pounds a year ago.

London is a shithole.

It's about £6.50, if that, for fish and chips in Ossett.

Sausage & chips is still about £3, fish is too fancy.

Seems pretty obvious to me that most of the world governments want this inflation. After all, they have just spent billions on the response (as piss poor as it was in a lot of cases) to a global pandemic, they've got to inflate away the debt haven't they.

The only difference here is that in the past they've been content to let steady long term inflation take care of it, but right now they're after a quick fix. The labour market is also going through frankly intolerable conditions wherein the average worker is gaining some legitimate bargaining power and that simply won't do.

If I was any more conspiratorially minded I might even suggest the war in Ukraine is some kind of orchestrated pantomime war to keep us distracted and provide a legit cover story for the complete economic stagnation we're looking at. I don#'t know if I'd quite go that far but I find it telling, in a cynical way, how they're content to spend billions more on the weapons to keep that war going instead of forcibly sitting both sides down at the negotiating table to shake hands and make up, giving the severe impacts it's having. Millions are going to be starving this winter as a direct result.

When was the last time anything got better instead of worse? Do you think we'll ever see it again?

>>38523
My theory is that the elites are time-travellers. If they can inflate money, then take it back in time, it will be worth more, so they can be even more elite in the past.

Pounds and ounces are coming back. I'm excited about being able to buy a Beautiful British Pound of nothing, instead of a Horrible European 453g of nothing.

I look forward to the frothing that a pound of butter isn't 18 pence like it should be.

>>38539
I just can't wait till half the boxes of Shreddies are in imperial and half are still in metric, so you need to do twice as much mental calculation every time you go shopping to make sure you aren't being overcharged.

>>38551
It's definitely a good way to obfuscate price rises through inflation and profiteering; nobody's going to want to calculate the difference on the fly

>>38539

What a fucking waste of time. Who cares. They're arbitrary units of measurement. We might as well convert all our distances to football fields and start measuring time in the unit of vinyl LPs.

>>38555

DON'T YOU WANT BRITAIN TO BE GREAT AGAIN?

Someone has pointed out this means non-imperial manufacturers will want to charge more for converting, but those who already use them won't have to - yet another nudge towards using shitty American goods, rather than European ones with higher quality standards and fewer additives.

>>38557
Of course, I never even considered this had something to do with bringing us closer in line with our mouth-breathing transatlantic cousins. Maybe we'll get to murder school kids in proper good old fashioned .226 instead of that foreign 5.56mm nonsense too in the future.

>>38557
>>38558
American weights and measures aren't necessarily inline with imperial though. They're fl. oz is defined differently, but turns out very similar. Their pint is smaller, and thus so is there gallon.

>The price of petrol saw its biggest daily jump in 17 years on Tuesday with a rise of more than 2p a litre. The RAC motoring group said the average cost of filling a typical family car with petrol was now £99.40 and could exceed £100 as soon as Thursday.

>With food and energy bills also surging, many households are under pressure. The average price of petrol rose to 180.73p per litre on Tuesday, the RAC said. Meanwhile, the average price of diesel rose by almost 1.5p to another record high of 186.57p per litre, making the cost of filling a 55-litre family car £102.61.

>In March, the government announced a 5p per litre cut to fuel duty to help reduce costs for motorists. However, motoring groups have raised concerns retailers are not passing on the cut to customers. On Wednesday the prime minister's official spokesman said the government was "not confident" this was happening at all petrol stations. He said the government was "continuing to look at all possible options" and "transparency may have an important role to play" in ensuring the cut is passed on. It comes after a government source told the BBC a plan to name and shame petrol stations that fail to do so is "still in the works". The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said if it found sufficient evidence the 5p fuel duty cut had not been passed on to drivers, then it would launch an investigation that could lead to fines for offending retailers.

>Retailers base their prices on the wholesale cost of petrol and diesel but there is typically a two-week lag for pump prices to reflect any changes in wholesale prices due to the time it takes for fuel to reach forecourts. Mr Williams said the RAC's fuel watch data showed Asda had hiked its average petrol price by nearly 5p a litre in a single day, which he said was "unheard of". In response, Asda said wholesale fuel prices had increased "at an unprecedented rate" and "we will do all we can to minimise the impact of rising wholesale prices on our customers". Meanwhile, some forecourts are already selling petrol above £2 per litre, according to price comparison website PetrolPrices. The highest price was found to be 202.9p at BP sites on the A1 near Sunderland, the M4 near Chippenham in Wiltshire and the M6 near Burton-in-Kendal, Cumbria.

>The AA motoring group said the 2p litre rise was a "huge shock", but said the speculation that petrol prices could rise to £2 per litre on average "just gives the fuel trade licence to pile on extra cost and the misery".

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-61731161

You heard the AA - stockpile on fuel now before it runs out and be sure to get a full tank before Thursday if you want to survive.

>>38678
Fuck's sake. How did Uber and co manage to steal the phrase 'ride sharing' for their exploitative nonsense, when such things are getting necessary just for proles to get to work? There seem to be loads of options on t'internet, anyone tried?
(Yeah, not suitable for everybody, completely understand, but if £2 a litre turns into £3, there's going to be a serious incentive.)
Obviously, I have an EV and free charging at work because I'm a cunt, but I do feel for you lot.

>>38679
I hope this doesn't push up the price of bicycles, like the one I ride because I am both more intelligent and more virtuous than any of you. People are going to want bikes if this keeps going.

>>38681
If you already have one why would you mind?

>>38683
It's impossible to own exactly one bike.

>>38684

The correct number of bicycles to own is n+1, where n is the number of bicycles you own.

>Chancellor Rishi Sunak has defended restoring the triple lock, which could see pensions rise by 10% in line with inflation. It comes as the government warns workers not to expect pay rises to keep pace with increasing costs.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-61894368

Time to get out and earn some pocket money before dating calendars fill up, lads.

We did it, 4.6% - we win. And this follows yesterday's news that wages are down, stocks up!

Lidl have changed their rewards system from spending £100 in a month in store so you get some sort of health bars, nuts or cereal to a small jar of spice.