You’re not giving capitalism enough credit. Corporations and businesses are not altruistic. If they can get away with slowly raising prices to increase profit margins, they will.
That’s a hell of a lot easier to actually achieve when you don’t have foreign produce acting as competition and consequently sanity-checking domestic prices. Foreign suppliers implicitly set a ceiling for how much a product can cost since the market would shift to using them if they became the cheaper option.
To make matters worse, tariffs are a very nice excuse for retailers to raise prices across the board using the excuse that “it costs us more to get it, so it has to cost you more to buy it.” If we’re lucky, they’ll raise foreign goods by the exact amount they’re paying more for them and only choose to raise domestic good prices (for profit) by only some fraction of that amount.
For basic stuff like rice the US produces way more than it needs, the only real imports I see are for specialty stuff like jasmine rice or bhasmati rice from Thailand or India. Basic long grain rice or calrose is domestic and very cheap.
It’s literally how capitalism works, so yes. They don’t care if it’s “mean.” They will ALWAYS price things as high as they can, and they will push it as far as they possibly can before sales start to dip.
If it’s a publicly traded company, they will literally oust you as CEO if you aren’t doing this because you’d be leaving money on the table.
Most food in the US is domestically produced, so no. The US is a huge exporter of food outside of specialty goods and tropical things.
You’re not giving capitalism enough credit. Corporations and businesses are not altruistic. If they can get away with slowly raising prices to increase profit margins, they will.
That’s a hell of a lot easier to actually achieve when you don’t have foreign produce acting as competition and consequently sanity-checking domestic prices. Foreign suppliers implicitly set a ceiling for how much a product can cost since the market would shift to using them if they became the cheaper option.
To make matters worse, tariffs are a very nice excuse for retailers to raise prices across the board using the excuse that “it costs us more to get it, so it has to cost you more to buy it.” If we’re lucky, they’ll raise foreign goods by the exact amount they’re paying more for them and only choose to raise domestic good prices (for profit) by only some fraction of that amount.
For basic stuff like rice the US produces way more than it needs, the only real imports I see are for specialty stuff like jasmine rice or bhasmati rice from Thailand or India. Basic long grain rice or calrose is domestic and very cheap.
It’s literally how capitalism works, so yes. They don’t care if it’s “mean.” They will ALWAYS price things as high as they can, and they will push it as far as they possibly can before sales start to dip.
If it’s a publicly traded company, they will literally oust you as CEO if you aren’t doing this because you’d be leaving money on the table.