#SHRINKFLATION

[worrynoodle]

I have a conspiracy theory, would you like to hear it?

I've been seeing an influx of "American groceries are so unnecessarily big 🤪" videos. And I think... I think it's like, companies who are responsible for shrink-flation are trying to normalize smaller groceries for more money.

I have no evidence for this.

But, here's the thing. If you aren't from the US, you might not quite understand the fact that getting food can be difficult. First, the US is made for vehicles, not for walking/biking. It is very rare that you can simply pop down to a corner store safely to pick up a few things here and there. Second, we usually have a whole household to feed. Third, a lot of us live 30 mins, 45 mins, an hour away from the nearest grocery store. And fourth, the vast majority of us live paycheck to paycheck. So, adding all that up, we have to make big trips, usually on payday, to stock up on a week or two of groceries for a whole household. That's why you see huge bags of chips, gallons of drinks, and other bulk items.

So making fun of us "Oh haha f*t Americans eat so much haha" please remember that not everybody has access to fresh, nutritious food and we have to do what we have to do.

[hasufin]

Shrinkflation

So, I found out a fun fact this last weekend!

Every state has a Department of Weights and Measures. One of their jobs is to make sure that companies are actually selling you the quantities they claim they're selling. For example, this is the department which tests gas pumps and makes sure they're really pumping out a gallon of gas when they charge you for a gallon of gas.

So....

If you happen to, just as an example, notice that your 1lb (16 ounce) box of San Giorgio spaghetti actually only has 10oz of noodles, and you weigh your other boxes of spaghetti to discover they run from 10 to 14 ounces but never the full pound they're supposed to have, and that's why you never seem to have enough pasta for leftovers the next day, then you can report that to the Department of Weights and Measures.

They will want to know where you bought the item, and then will investigate whether the store or the manufacturer is routinely shorting customers. If they do, they will issue a fine to the offending party, you will be eligible for a refund, and under some circumstances lawsuits may follow.

Now, I don't know the outcome of the complaint I just initiated, but they did not want to know specific receipts or times of purchase. Which is good for me as I didn't keep any of those things, at the time I just said "Wow, fuck San Giorgio" and switched brands. But this is still enough to get an inspector out.

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #31

August 9-16 2024

President Biden and Vice-President Harris announced together the successful conclusion of the first negotiations between Medicare and pharmaceutical companies over drug prices. For years Medicare was not allow to directly negotiate princes with drug companies leaving seniors to pay high prices. It has been a Democratic goal for many years to change this. President Biden noted he first introduced a bill to allow these negotiations as a Senator back in 1973. Thanks to Inflation Reduction Act, passed with no Republican support using Vice-President Harris' tie breaking vote, this long time Democratic goal is now a reality. Savings on these first ten drugs are between 38% and 79% and will collectively save seniors $1.8 billion dollars in out of pocket costs. This comes on top of the Biden-Harris Administration already having capped the price of insulin for Medicare's 3.5 million diabetics at $35 a month, as well as the Administration's plan to cap Medicare out of pocket drug costs at $2,000 a year starting January 2025.

President Biden and Vice President Harris have launched a wide ranging all of government effort to crack down on companies wasting customers time with excessive paperwork, hold times, and robots rather than real people. Some of the actions from the "Time is Money" effort include: The FTC and FCC putting forward rules that require companies to make canceling a subscription or service as easy as signing up for it. The Department of Transportation has required automatic refunds for canceled flights. The CFPB is working on rules to require companies to have to allow customers to speak to a real person with just one button click ending endless "doom loops" of recored messages. The CFPB is also working on rules around chatbots, particularly their use from banks. The FTC is working on rules to ban companies from posting fake reviews, suppressing honest negative reviews, or paying for  positive reviews. HHS and the Department of Labor are taking steps to require insurance companies to allow health claims to be submitted online. All these actions come on top of the Biden Administration's efforts to get rid of junk fees.

President Biden and First Lady Jill Biden announced further funding as part of the President's Cancer Moonshot. The Cancer Moonshot was launched by then Vice-President Biden in 2016 in the aftermath of his son Beau Biden's death from brain cancer in late 2015. It was scrapped by Trump as political retaliation against the Obama-Biden Administration. Revived by President Biden in 2022 it has the goal of cutting the number of cancer deaths in half over the next 25 years, saving 4 million lives. Part of the Moonshot is Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), grants to help develop cutting edge technology to prevent, detect, and treat cancer. The President and First Lady announced $150 million in ARPA-H grants this week focused on more successful cancer surgeries. With grants to Tulane, Rice, Johns Hopkins, and Dartmouth, among others, they'll help fund imaging and microscope technology that will allow surgeons to more successfully determine if all cancer has been remove, as well as medical imaging focused on preventing damage to healthy tissues during surgeries.

Vice-President Harris announced a 4-year plan to lower housing costs. The Vice-President plans on offering $25,000 to first time home buyers in down-payment support. It's believed this will help support 1 million first time buyers a year. She also called for the building of 3 million more housing units, and a $40 billion innovation fund to spur innovative housing construction. This adds to President Biden's call for a $10,000 tax credit for first time buyers and calls by the President to punish landlords who raise the rent by over 5%.

President Biden Designates the site of the 1908 Springfield Race Riot a National Monument. The two day riot in Illinois capital took place just blocks away from Abraham Lincoln's Springfield home. In August 1908, 17 people die, including a black infant, and 2,000 black refugees were forced to flee the city. As a direct result of the riot, black community leaders and white allies met a few months later in New York and founded the NAACP. The new National Monument will seek to preserve the history and educate the public both on the horrible race riot as well as the foundation of the NAACP. This is the second time President Biden has used his authority to set up a National Monument protecting black history, after setting up the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument on Emmett Till's 82nd birthday July 25th 2023.

The Department of The Interior announced $775 million to help cap and clean up orphaned oil and gas wells. The money will help cap wells in 21 states. The Biden-Harris Administration has allocated $4.7 billion to plug orphaned wells, a billion of which has already been distributed. More than 8,200 such wells have been capped since the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2022. Orphaned wells leak toxins into communities and are leaking the super greenhouse gas methane. Plugging them will not only improve the health of nearby communities but help fight climate change on a global level.

Vice-President Harris announced plans to ban price-gouging in the food and grocery industries. This would be a first ever federal ban on price gouging and Harris called for clear "rules of the road" on price rises in food, and strong penalties from the FTC for those who break them. This is in line with President Biden's launching of a federal Strike Force on Unfair and Illegal Pricing in March, and Democratic Senator Bob Casey's bill to ban "shrinkflation". In response to this pressure from Democrats on price gouging and after aggressive questions by Senator Casey and Senator Elizabeth Warren, the supermarket giant Kroger proposed dropping prices by a billion dollars

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[obelisart]

When are they planning to stop?

Read my comics in order on Webtoon Canvas

Early access and exclusive comics on my Patreon

[gallifreyriver]

So, Kellogg's Boycott. Again. Haven't seen any posts about it here yet, so figured I'd make one.

In short: We're all tired of these big companies gouging their prices just because they can, and calling it 'inflation.' We're tired of companies announcing record profits while they cut bonuses/lay people off/force workers to run on skeleton crews/etc. We're tired of "Shrinkflation" And we're tired of a bunch of other shit too, but you get my point.

So, vote with your wallet.

On April 1st, stop buying Kellogg's, and keep that up until June 30th. Just three months- just one quarter of the fiscal year. Companies report earnings each quarter, and if their earnings drop it will reflect in these quarterly reports.

Why Kellogg's?

Because their CEO recently pulled a "Let them eat cake." TLDR; Kellogg's has raised prices by 28% across the board, bragged about record breaking profits, and then suggested that families struggling to afford groceries, because of aforementioned price gouging, just "eat cereal for dinner!"

And well, that message was not well received by anyone, as one could imagine. Pissed a lot of people off.

So yeah. The plan is to stop buying any Kellogg's products (below) for the entirety of the second quarter (April 1st-June 30th) and to collectively tell Kellogg to fuck off until they lower their prices. The goal isn't to "destroy the company" or cost anyone their jobs- but we will hit them where they will listen. Their profits.

If they don't listen, then we don't come back, and we start in on the next company, and keep going until they all get the message. There's always alternatives (more on that below) and we don't need them. If they refuse to drop their prices, then we just stick with the alternatives we found.

Three months is a minor inconvenience to teach a corporation a lesson, and we can do it.

So, take this month before April to find your alternatives. If you need help, I based a non-comprehensive list (below) off the image above. There's tons more just a google search away, and I bet others have made lists as well. There's also always the option to make your own. There's tons of recipes online showing how to make dupes of your favorite products.

Some things to note:

Don't go stocking up on your favorite Kellogg's products the last week of March and think you're not crossing the picket line. The point is to make Kellogg's feel the loss in profits, and stocking up on Cheez-its beforehand will defeat the purpose. I sincerely promise you can make it three months without buying Kellogg's. Again, three months is a minor inconvenience to teach a corporation a lesson, and we can do it.

That said, Safe Foods are acknowledged. If you or your child is neurodivergent and has issues with food (i.e: literally won't be won't be able to eat at all without their safe food) you get a pass. By all means feel free to try and find alternatives, but it's very unlikely that the few who can't boycott will cause it to fail. There should be plenty of the rest of us to pick up the slack.

Don't be a bystander- meaning don't go about this thinking "Oh, well surely there's enough people boycotting that it's fine if I just-" No. If we ever want things to change then we need to be strong enough to do even something as small as not buying something we like for three months. Furthermore, it's on those of us who can afford Kellogg's products to boycott Kellogg's. It's not the responsibility of those who already can't afford Eggos to boycott Eggos. Nothing will change if you go about just assuming everyone else already has it handled for you. Take a stand.

And importantly, Spread the word. This only works if we let as many people as possible know about it.

So reblog this post, or make your own post, or both. Even feel free to copy and paste this entire post off-platform if you need to. I've also seen some suggest making flyers, or even just writing on post-it notes, and sticking them to Kellogg's products in the store to spread the word off-line.

Just get the word out there. If we ever want these companies to stop gouging us for every cent we've earned, then we have to make a stand somewhere.

If we do nothing it will only ever get worse.

[not-safe-for-democracy]

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #10

March 15-22 2024

The EPA announced new emission standards with the goal of having more than half of new cars and light trucks sold in the US be low/zero emission by 2032. One of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, it'll eliminate 7 billion tons of CO2 emissions over the next 30 years. It's part of President Biden's goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 on the road to eliminating them totally by 2050.

President Biden canceled nearly 6 Billion dollars in student loan debt. 78,000 borrowers who work in public sector jobs, teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters etc will have their debt totally forgiven. An additional 380,000 public service workers will be informed that they qualify to have their loans forgiven over the next 2 years. The Biden Administration has now forgiven $143.6 Billion in student loan debt for 4 million Americans since the Supreme Court struck down the original student loan forgiveness plan last year.

Under Pressure from the administration and Democrats in Congress Drugmaker AstraZeneca caps the price of its inhalers at $35. AstraZeneca joins rival Boehringer Ingelheim in capping the price of inhalers at $35, the price the Biden Admin capped the price of insulin for seniors. The move comes as the Federal Trade Commission challenges AstraZeneca’s patents, and Senator Bernie Sanders in his role as Democratic chair of the Senate Health Committee investigates drug pricing.

The Department of Justice sued Apple for being an illegal monopoly in smartphones. The DoJ is joined by 16 state attorneys general. The DoJ accuses Apple of illegally stifling competition with how its apps work and seeking to undermining technologies that compete with its own apps.

The EPA passed a rule banning the final type of asbestos still used in the United States. The banning of chrysotile asbestos (known as white asbestos) marks the first time since 1989 the EPA taken action on asbestos, when it passed a partial ban. 40,000 deaths a year in the US are linked to asbestos

President Biden announced $8.5 billion to help build advanced computer chips in America. Currently America only manufactures 10% of the world's chips and none of the most advanced next generation of chips. The deal with Intel will open 4 factories across 4 states (Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon) and create 30,000 new jobs. The Administration hopes that by 2030 America will make 20% of the world's leading-edge chips.

President Biden signed an Executive Order prioritizing research into women's health. The order will direct $200 million into women's health across the government including comprehensive studies of menopause health by the Department of Defense and new outreach by the Indian Health Service to better meet the needs of American Indian and Alaska Native Women. This comes on top of $100 million secured by First Lady Jill Biden from ARPA-H.

Democratic Senators Bob Casey, Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, and Jacky Rosen (all up for re-election) along with Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Sheldon Whitehouse, introduced the "Shrinkflation Prevention Act" The Bill seeks to stop the practice of companies charging the same amount for products that have been subtly shrunk so consumers pay more for less.

The Department of Transportation will invest $45 million in projects that improve Bicyclist and Pedestrian Connectivity and Safety

The EPA will spend $77 Million to put 180 electric school buses onto the streets of New York City This is part of New York's goal to transition its whole school bus fleet to electric by 2035.

The Senate confirmed President Biden's nomination of Nicole Berner to the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Berner has served as the general counsel for America's largest union, SEIU, since 2017 and worked in their legal department since 2006. On behalf of SEIU she's worked on cases supporting the Affordable Care Act, DACA, and against the Defense of Marriage act and was part of the Fight for 15. Before working at SEIU she was a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood. Berner's name was listed by the liberal group Demand Justice as someone they'd like to see on the Supreme Court. Berner becomes one of just 5 LGBT federal appeals court judges, 3 appointed by Biden. The Senate also confirmed Edward Kiel and Eumi Lee to be district judges in New Jersey and Northern California respectively, bring the number of federal judges appointed by Biden to 188.

[thebiscuiteternal]

Could you explain more about the WIC shrinkflation issue? I was advised to apply for the program and now I'm worried about the complications.

Sure thing.

For starters, while WIC is a national program, states can and do implement certain aspects of it differently, so disclaimer that this is coming from a Tennessee viewpoint.

Okay, so.

WIC (Women Infants Children) vouchers are designed to help make sure that babies and toddlers are getting enough nutrition during early development. It usually runs alongside food stamps, but sometimes someone might be eligible for food stamps, but not WIC, or vise versa.

For infants -> pre-solid-food toddlers, it covers formula and baby food, and for pregnant mothers and/or toddlers eating solid foods, it usually covers fruits, vegetables, and certain staple foods.

WIC vouchers are very specific about what you can get with them, especially when it comes to baby food. They will label

Brands (Usually Gerber, Beech Nut, or other approved affiliate brands)

Formula varieties (usually high-vitamin)

Food type (Typically no mixed flavors, i.e. you can get jars of spinach and jars of turkey, but not a jar of blended spinach and turkey. This also trips up a lot of first-timers.)

Age (Baby foods typically come in development stages, so the vouchers will usually say whether you can have Stage 1, stage 2, etc)

Packaging (Whether it has to be glass jars or you can substitute with the mini plastic tubs. Usually pouch foods are not allowed)

Number (i.e. 12 jars of pureed meats or what have you)

Weight (boxes of baby cereals like oatmeal or rice, the size of the formula cans, or the size of the jars)

Some foods will specify whether or not it has to be organic

(Note: The local WIC offices used to send a pamphlet with the vouchers that included pictures of particular packaging to help ESL recipients, but with companies changing the look of their packaging too frequently, this has stopped in a lot of places.)

So, already a lot to look out for, yeah? And weight is usually where things get fucked. As I said in the previous post, companies (especially Gerber) have a really irritating habit where they will up and change the actual weight of the product without informing the WIC office of the change in time for the next round of vouchers (if they bother to inform them at all, instead of the WIC office having to contact them due to complaints). But of course the store knows about the change due to their inventory programs.

As a result, you'll either get:

A: The parent who has already been through this shit and now tries to verify the labels and is upset because they can't find the box with the correct ounce amount anymore (because it no longer exists).

B: The parent who hasn't been through this shit yet and grabbed the same box they got the month previously and is unaware it's now the wrong box until the register refuses to apply it to their monthly voucher.

C: The cashier who has to deal with this day in and day out and is just as frustrated as the parents, especially if they don't have enough experience to know this is the companies' fault, not the parents'.

I should also note that this has been a problem for a long time. It was already happening back when I was still working. But at least back then, you could count on at least 8 months (or even a couple of years) between sizing incidents, whereas Post-Covid, it's accelerated to practically a fuckup (or more) a month. If this month, it's the cereal, next month, it's the formula, etc. A neverending carousel of corporate bullshit. And the companies don't care, because they've already gotten their government subsidy for participating in the program at all, and if the parents have to pay out of pocket for the things the vouchers no longer cover that month, that's just more profit for the company.

[aniseandspearmint]

...when did ice cream pints stop being PINTS???

I haven't bought one in years, bc I usually just get a bigger container of like vanilla or chocolate or cookies and cream, but I had to go fill a prescription anyway so I grabbed a little thing of pistachio and and as I'm eating it I really looked at it and this is fucking 14 oz, not 16oz (a pint).

I wanna kick someone in the shins for this.

What the hell.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Rural towns and poor urban neighborhoods are being devoured by dollar stores

Across America, rural communities and big cities alike are passing ordinances limiting the expansion of dollar stores, which use a mix of illegal predatory tactics, labor abuse, and monopoly consolidation to destroy the few community grocery stores that survived the Walmart plague and turn poor places into food deserts.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

"The Dollar Store Invasion," is a new Institute For Local Self Reliance (ILSR) report by Stacy Mitchell, Kennedy Smith and Susan Holmberg. It paints a detailed, infuriating portrait of the dollar store playback, and sets out a roadmap of tactics that work and have been proven in dozens of places, rural and urban:

https://cdn.ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ILSR-Report-The-Dollar-Store-Invasion-2023.pdf

The impact of dollar stores is plainly stated in the introduction: "dollar stores drive grocery stores and other retailers out of business, leave more people without access to fresh food, extract wealth from local economies, sow crime and violence, and further erode the prospects of the communities they target."

This new report builds on ILSR's longstanding and excellent case-studies, augmenting them with the work of academic geographers who are just starting to literally map out the dollar store playbook, identifying the way that a dollar stores will target, say, the last grocery store in a Black neighborhood and literally surround it, like hyenas cornering weakened prey. This tactic is repeated whenever a new grocer opens in the neighborhood: dollar stores "carpet bomb" the surrounding blocks, ensuring that the new store closes as quickly as it opens.

One important observation is the relationship between these precarious neighborhood grocers and Walmart and its other big-box competitors. Deregulation allowed Walmart to ring cities with giant stores that relied on "predatory buying" (wholesale terms that allowed Walmart to sell goods more cheaply than its competitors bought them, and also rendered its suppliers brittle and sickly, and forced down the wages of those suppliers' workers). This was the high cost of low prices: neighborhoods lost their local grocers, and community dollars ceased to circulate in the community, flowing to Walmart and its billionaire owners, who spent it on union busting and political campaigns for far-right causes, including the defunding of public schools.

This is the landscape where the dollar stores took root: a nation already sickened by an apex predator, which left a productive niche for jackals to pick off the weakened survivors. Wall Street loved the look of this: the Private equity giant KKR took over Dollar General in 2007 and went on a acquisition and expansion bonanza. Even after KKR formally divested itself of Dollar General, the company's hit-man Michael M Calbert stayed on the board, rising to chairman.

The dollar store market is a duopoly. Dollar General's rival is Dollar Tree, another gelatinous cube of a company that grew by absorbing many of its competitors, using Wall Street's money. These acquisitions are now notorious for the weaknesses they exposed in antitrust practice. For example, when Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar, growing to 14,000 stores, the FTC waved the merger through on condition that the new business sell off 330 of them. These ineffectual and pointless merger conditions are emblematic of the inadequacy of antitrust as it was practiced from the Reagan administration until the sea-change under Biden, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar is the poster child for more muscular enforcement.

The duopoly has only grown since then. Today, Dollar General and Dollar Tree have more than 34,000 US outlets - more than Starbucks, #Walmart, McDonalds and Target - combined.

Destroying a community's grocery store rips out its heart. Neighborhoods without decent access to groceries impose a tax on their already-struggling residents, forcing them to spend hours traveling to more affluent places, or living off the highly processed, deceptively priced (more on this later) goods for sale on the dollar store shelves.

Take Cleveland, once served by a small family chain called Dave's Market that had served its communities since the 1920s. Dave's store in the Collinwood neighborhood was targeted by Family Dollar and Dollar General, which opened seven stores within two miles of the Dave's outlet. The dollar stores targeted the only profitable part of Dave's business - the packaged goods (fresh produce is a money-loser, subsidized by packaged good).

The dollar stores used a mix of predatory buying and "cheater sizes" (packaged goods that are 10-20% smaller than those sold in regular outlets, which are not available to other retailers) to sell goods at prices that Dave's couldn't match, driving Dave's out of business.

Typical dollar stores stock no fresh produce or meat. If your only grocer is a dollar store, your only groceries are highly processed, packaged foods, often sold in deceptive single-serving sizes that actually cost more per ounce than the products that the defunct neighborhood grocer once sold.

Dollar stores don't just target existing food deserts - they create them. Dollar stores preferentially target Black and brown neighborhoods with just a single grocer and then they use predatory pricing (subsidizing the cost of goods and selling them at a loss) and predatory buying to force that grocery store under and tip the neighborhood into food desert status.

Dollar stores don't just target Black and brown urban centers; they also go after rural communities. The commonality here is that both places are likely to be served by independent grocers, not chains, and these indies can't afford a pricing war with the Wall Street-backed dollar store duopoly.

As mentioned, the "predatory buying" of dollar stores is illegal - it was outlawed in 1936 under the Robinson-Patman Act, which required wholesalers to offer goods to all merchants on the same terms. 40 years ago, we stopped enforcing those laws, leading the rise and rise of big box stores and the destruction of the American Main Street.

The lawmakers who passed Robinson-Patman knew what they were doing. They were aware of what contemporary economists call "the waterbed effect," where wholesalers cover the losses from their massive discounts to major retailers by hiking prices on smaller stores, making them even less competitive and driving more market consolidation.

When dollar stores invade your town or neighborhood, they don't just destroy the food choices, they also come for neighborhood jobs. Where a community grocer typically employs 12 or more people, Dollar General employs about 8 per store. Those workers are paid less, too: 92% of Dollar General's workers earn less than $15/h, making Dollar General the worst employer of the 66 large service-sector firms.

Dollar stores also lean heavily into the tactic of turning nearly every role at its store into a "management" job, because managers aren't entitled to overtime pay. That's how you can be the "manger" of a dollar store and take home $40,000 a year while working more than 40 hours every single week.

Understaffing stores turns them into crime magnets. Shootings at dollar stores are routine. Between 2014-21, 485 people were shot at dollar stores - 156 of them died. Understaffed warehouses are vermin magnets. In the Eastern District of Arkansas, Family Dollar was subpoenaed after a rat infestation at its distribution centers that contaminated the food, medicines and cosmetics at 400 stores.

The ILSR doesn't just document the collapse of American communities - it fights back, so this report ends with a lengthy section on proven tactics and future directions for repelling the dollar store invasion. Since 2019, 75 communities have blocked proposals for new dollar stores - more than 50 of those cases happened in 2021/22.

54 towns, from Birmingham, AB to Fort Worth, TX to  Kansas City, KS, have passed laws to "sharply restrict new dollar stores, typically by barring them from opening within one to two miles of an existing dollar store."

To build on this momentum, the authors call for a "reinvigoration of antitrust laws," especially the Robinson-Patman Act. Banning predatory buying would go far to creating a level playing field for independent grocers hoping to fight off a dollar store infestation.

Further, we need the FTC and Department of Justice Antitrust Divition to block mergers between dollar-store chains and unwind the anticompetitve mergers that were negligently waved through under previous administrations (thankfully, top enforcers like Jonathan Kantor and Lina Khan are on top of this!).

We need to free up capital for community banks that will back community grocers. That means rolling back the bank deregulation of the 1980s/90s that allowed for bank consolidation and preferential treatment for large corporations, while reducing lending to small businesses and destroying regional banks. Congress should cap the market share any bank can hold, break up the biggest banks, and require banks to preference loans for community businesses. We also need to end private equity and Wall Street's rollup bonanza.

All of that sounds like a tall order - and it is! But the good news is that it's not just groceries at stake here. Every kind of community business, from pet groomers to hairdressers to funeral homes, falls into the antitrust "Twilight Zone," of acquisitions under $101m. With 60% of Boomer-owned businesses expected to sell in the coming decade, 2.9m businesses employing 32m American workers are slated to be gobbled up by private equity:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Whether you're burying a loved one, getting dialysis, getting your cat fixed or having your dog's nails trimmed, you are already likely to be patronizing a business that has been captured by private equity, where the service is worse, the prices are higher and the workers earn less for harder jobs. Everyone has a stake in financial regulation. We are all in this fight, except for the eminently guillotineable PE barons, and you know, fuck those guys

At the state level, the authors propose new muscular enforcement regimes and new laws to protect small businesses from unfair competition. They also call on states to increase the power of local governments to reject new dollar store applications, amending land use guidelines to require "cultivating net economic growth, ensuring that everyone has access to healthy food, and protecting environmental resources.

If all of this has you as fired up as it got me this morning, check out ILSR's "How to Stop Dollar Stores in Your Community" resources:

http://ilsr.org/dollar-stores

I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Mike McBey (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/158652122@N02/38893547595/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[Image ID: A ghost town; it is towered over by a haunted castle with a Dollar General sign on it, with the shadow of Count Orlock cast over its tower. One of its turrets is being struck by lightning.]

[ncdweller]

I can’t be too mad. It was marked down to $2.

But there’s more plastic (and air) than chocolate.

[reginaldqueribundus]

shrinkflation is getting out of hand. the “family size” bag of Munchies snack mix is now smaller than the regular size used to be. the Campbell's Chunky Soup cans aren't even chunky anymore. cereal is $5-6 and the box is practically a DVD case. I shit you not, I almost bought a box of cereal the other day that was 250 grams (for the USAmericans that's less than 9 ounces). where will it stop

[nando161mando]

[Shrinkflation] 3.77% less, but now with the same price! Read the labels! They screw you everywhere you can...soon it'll be empty bags and jars, but for more money it's a bargain!

[gramarobin]

👀